Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "" video.

19:36 "I think the proper mentality to have as a programmer is, everything is horshit, it's all inconvenient. And either you deal with the things given to you, or you write it yourself and you deal with that." Amen!
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13:10 I think an awesome engineer must have great communication skills but it has nothing to do with public communication. I do believe that you have to write a lot to become good at communicating in written form and writing human readable source code is definitely a form of communication. However, being able to communicate fluently in English doesn't mean you're fluent in Chinese, JavaScript or Finnish. I do agree that being able to express complex thoughts in understandable way in any language demonstrates ability to think which is obviously important to be the "best programmer".
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6:19 I disagree here. Unless the error message comes from the software you maintain and you write good error messages that actually match the error case described by the message, you cannot trust that the root cause actually matches the error message. Especially if the code uses exception handling of any kind. More often than not the catch clause is too generic and then blame the only issue that the original author of the code was thinking and any other reason for the same exception will also trigger the very same error message. Typical example would be catching an IO error and reporting "file not found" when the true cause was access denied for one of the path segments.
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0:53 After a quarter century of programming, I usually literally go for the source – that is, read the actual source code of the library you're going to use because even the official documentation always lies. You can use the documentation as introduction to code. This is also the reason I only use open source libraries. If I cannot see the source, I don't know how the implementation is going to work because the documentation always lies. Not intentionally most of the time but unless the documentation is automatically generated from the actual source code, it will always fail to describe the actual implementation more or less.
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11:40 I don't think that "best programmers" always help others. I think it makes sense to help others if you think long term future but for short term helping other developers may just slow you down. If the "best programmer" is in the project for a short time (for any reason), it doesn't make sense to use that time to help and teach unless that was the whole reason the "best programmer" was brought into the team. However, even if you target long term, it might be that helping/teaching other members of the team is wasted effort because CEO might end up firing the person you just spent weeks to train. I like teaching my team members new skills but that's not without risks or side-effects.
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