Posted by jxmorris12 13 hours ago
That advice has stuck with me, and I try to have the least taste I can. I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.
Until I was 30-something I thought I just didn't like coffee or chocolate.
Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entirely different things.
Same even more so for chocolate. 99% of chocolate products you come into contact with are garbage. Actual chocolate is like an entirely different product. It's not a better version of the usual thing. I ate it and thought "Oh. Ok THIS must be why chocolate ever became this huge thing in the first place. Hundreds of years ago before all the industrial process and market forces produced all the "chocolate" I ever tasted in my life, what they had was this, actual chocolate. Of course they loved it."
To restate the point, I was never happy with the regular version in the first place. I assumed "I don't like coffee" or chocolate, the same way I don't like cigarettes. Turns out I love them both.
And it's possible to continue to enjoy the results of having discovered and grown some taste in some area indefinitely without diminishing returns or anything like that. I'm not much of a sweets person so I still don't buy a lot of chocolate or chocolate things like cookies etc, but we have a Trade subscription and get a new and different bag from some random indipendant roaster every 2 or 3 weeks and it's great. I don't love every single bag but I at least find them all interesting and I do love the overall high level of quality basically all the time. I'm not now overall poorer for having discovered good coffee. Life is better. And what else is there?
I only ask because specifically for chocolate and coffee, I would consider the US baseline to be exceedingly average, even terrible. Even "okay" chocolate and coffee from other countries better known for food will blow it out of the water.
The US does do excellent coffee, and excellent chocolate, but you have to seek it out. In a country like Italy or Australia the default, okay stuff is better. If an Australian couldn't tell the difference between good and great coffee I'd see why.
Same it was with me for coffee, I enjoy single origin vs supermarket coffee, but after that it got to a point where I couldn't realistically make up the difference.
There seems to be an 80/20 effect here on how much you should deep-dive into these tangent domains in your life.
I think it's a bit different from developing taste, what you describe. It's more about finding out who you are. I would say once you know your baseline for what makes chocolate/coffee/etc enjoyable, then taste is about experiencing the nuances within that spectrum. Some people also have a greater tolerance for things that aren't really tasty due to coming up in a culture where things generally taste plain or bad (netherlands and UK come to mind).
The dried beans were simply cooked with water. Later with milk. Chocolate as we know it only became a thing centuries later. (Dried milk was only invented in 1802, and you can’t make milk chocolate without that for example)
So have you tried Cuban cigars?
I guess it's a natural question given the rest, and expensive cigars might indeed be different than cheap cigarrettes, but it's irrelevant, since the point was not that no matter what you don't like you might still like the good version.
The point was only that discovering the good version of something did not leave me worse than before because I used to enjoy something abundant and now I can only enjoy something scarce.
It's a bit like Feynman on flowers too. You don't have to be ignorant of the biological workings of a flower to appreciate it's mere outward properties exactly the same way as the layperson does. I still love a box mac & cheese even though I thoroughly appreciate far better home or chef made mac & cheese.
I know what you mean, but it's important to be mindful of the fact that enjoying coffee is way more than the quality of the coffee in the cup. I think for most there's a whole ritual around having a coffee which renders the actual coffee a minor detail around everything. You can see this even in coffee brewing snobs, where they use extremely specialized tools and equipment to perform a coffee brewing cerimonies that rival religious ones. Sometimes the coffee itself is just the pretext, but the goal is different.
That chocolate - can you name a product, or give us a link? I think I know what you mean, but one can never be sure.
Just don't become a snob. I think people tie their identity to the expensive junk they purchase and develop a sense of ego around it, of being better than the peasants, and that's why they become unable to enjoy the "lesser" experience.
E.g. a great designer will be able to design houses in very different styles, because they can understand what gives each of those styles its own specific beauty.
There's a lot to say about this, but I think your coffee friend never passed the snob-like point, which is a point I think most people reach when they learn just enough about something and that makes them feel superior. But if you keep going, then you start to understand what makes Italian coffee great as well, for example.
Wrt to coffee, I speak from experience, after going through very expensive equipment, I have learned to enjoy very different styles of roasts, coffees, etc. I still have preferences, I'm just far less judgmental.
Applies to most of my hobbies, I've seen this trajectory very often.
It's about learning enough to be able to appreciate something beyond surface level. You struck a chord with coffee and headphones - yes, I've gone deep on both, but rather than suck the enjoyment out of cheaper options it's given me an appreciation across the segment. I can now buy a cheap coffee and make it taste excellent - I can appreciate a well tuned headphone regardless of cost or lack of technicalities.
When headphones reach $2k+ and coffee starts costing $50 for 100g, rather than get universally better they tend to get opinionated - a different flavor of weird as a friend once said.
So I would suggest that it's fine to go deep on something, but make sure you're doing it to get to a deeper true/understanding.
And true to my predictions, I no longer play tennis and I'm only $15 poorer. I don't know the name for this, but the fact that I avoided wasting $150 and only "wasted" $15 into something I knew might be temporary also feels very satisfying.
I'll get a better camera, when I'm a better photographer and the camera is actually the limiting factor, but I expect that is very very very far off.
Meanwhile there are shorter events you can do on much less training and cheaper equipment to see if you’ll like it before investing in the extreme end of the sport. If you run a 10k and hate every step, you’ve saved yourself a lot of time, pain and money.
I'll replace it once I know how it is holding me back. At least that's the plan I've had for the last 4-5 years. But it has low action, fairly low-noise pickups, holds tuning. So no need so far.
that's probably the best decision you could have made, much better than putting an extra 40euros in a slightly more expensive guitar!
The pareto principle holds strong. Just put 20% of the effort in and you reap 80% of the results.
Practicing photography on a smartphone is terrible compared to a dedicated device; in both ergonomics (hard to get a good grip, unprecise shutter actuation due to the touchscreen, and sometime unreliable software) and quality (granted, I like to actually print my picture instead of looking at them on a tiny screen; but still the difference is noticeable).
But that doesn't doesn't necessarily mean you need a camera system that cost as much as a small car; you can get plenty joy with an entry-level mirrorless (which would be in the pareto 20% price range).
While if you just ignore most of that and buy something mid tier, you feel quite happy because it works pretty well and you didn't spend too much on it. The moment you start scrolling the subreddit for the product you've gone too far and need to disengage.
When my older kid wanted a gaming monitor, he suggested a specific model because it was on sale and he could afford it. I took that opportunity to do some research solo that night, find a few alternatives, research each deeply and then suggest that we "look together at 2 or 3 different models", compare the features, and talked through whether it really mattered if one was $100 more than the other given the likely useful lifespan of a monitor.
He ended up with a monitor that he's really happy with, we got some time together bonding over a shared interest, and he doesn't have to know all the flaws I saw in it. (It's also barely mid-tier, which is congruent with your advice.)
I prefer to just ask for a recommendation. Looking at specs is often just a money sinkhole to me.
I purposely just go for hikes for the sake of it, and refuse to give in and buy anything other than a generic bike, even though a part of me really wants __ hardware. If I buy it, that will be the point of no return for becoming a bike nerd and I'll start caring about stuff I don't want to care about.
Now computers, I've learned a million ways to hate them, and learn new ways to hate them every day. Not with bikes, though :)
Sure, I could probably be a bit faster or go on a bit longer if I had better gear. But I could also achieve that by just getting into a better shape. With this level of commitment the gear is not the limiting factor. If I can't go faster with this bike, then I don't deserve to go faster with a fancier one, god dammit.
My work is very complicated and technical, so I get some satisfaction from keeping my hobbies ascetic.
Typing this out makes me realize its not even about the music anymore, but the tweaks. Let this be a warning
To put that into more concrete terms: I really like dark roast black coffee. There’s something about the bitterness and presentation that reminds me of coffee’s history, the variety of people drinking it, etc. and thus it is more appealing to me than the “high quality” light roasts with subtle flavors available in the expensive cafes.
Another example are diners. If you become such a gourmand that you only eat at Michelin restaurants and disparage anywhere “normal”, I think you miss out on the real culture and quality of diner food, which is a unique phenomenon.
Hopefully that made sense.
“Blacker than a moonless night. Hotter and more bitter than hell itself… that is coffee.”
Lighter roast coffee just isn’t a thing I generally enjoy, to me it feels like a different drink, an over-complicated consumer product, not the kind of thing one would write quotes like the one above about.
A bit like grilling vs. sous vide with meat. Grilling has a whole culture to it, whereas sous vide feels soulless and overly technical, even if it produces great flavors.
Another is to look at what the low end are trying to do, with wine it is generally appeal to as many people as possible, buying things like the supermarkets own brand of a variety of you like is a good way to get a great bottle.
If you can’t appreciate why the simple / cheap stuff is loved by the masses I wouldn’t think anyone is a true expert in their field. Feels like a well worn path for chefs.
The point of the video/movie/song etc. is the content not the fidelity, there is a level of fidelity that allows 99 per cent of the enjoyment of the content. That level of fidelity typically costs 20$ for headphones and 200$ for tvs.
1080p and mp3s are good enough. The point is to see what's happening on the screen and to hear without noise.
Coffee is a great example, I worked through the whole stack, tried everything I had access to until eventually I weeded out what matters most to me.
Good beans, good milk, and just enough prep. I tried no prep, all the prep, and then just enough prep. Good beans not perfect beans. Good milk but whatever is available.
I do the same with everything, cars, bicycles, sim racing equipment, computers, software etc.
The <1$ earphones you get on an airplane sound terrible. I can understand what the actors in movies are saying but that's about it. I can't hear or experience the music.
The $20 headphones my kids have are a good step up. For me headphones/speakers in the $100 range make me _feel_ more when listening to music. But I don't need to go more expensive. That's where my threshold is for music.
Thank you for sharing this observation. It resonated with me in a surprising way. Finding something that's "good enough" is such a blessing.
When I cared, I cared about movies as well. It’s just the energy of caring. Now I don’t find movies interesting at all.
A friend and I have bonded over appreciating the "shit" things, like white bread toast and hotel coffee and I think that's quite a good habit to instill. I love coffee and will hunt out the best spots in any city for a single-origin V60 on ice, but I am equally content in a diner when the only option is literally just "coffee".
Also studying art & practicing photography has made the world a much more beautiful place. Some of my best pictures have been taken in places that are usually considered unphotogenic.
To quote Reggie Watts:
Listen, invest two hundred dollars in a pair of good headphones Take care of ′em, put 'em in your ears, listen to the music Listen to how it′s supposed to be recorded You're missing, I swear to God, forty to fifty percent Of the music that's in there in the first place So if you wanna go back and listen to The shit that you thought you liked You might even like it more, motherf*er
This did inspire me to get better headphones and I have no regrets! I think some parts of the aversion to getting too fancy come from the reasonable ideas of: not wanting to lower your floor, avoiding the hedonic treadmill, and not wanting to increase your burn. This kind of does make sense for coffee: a lot of coffees you get will be out of your control and increasing the fanciness of your coffee is an ongoing expense. For headphones though they're all moot. I can't remember the last time I wore someone else's headphones, and it's just a pretty small once off payment (these have lasted me 5 years). I would strongly recommend upgrading in this department.
As for TVs, I rewatched Alien on my friend's new LG OLED and it was absolutely stunning. I am looking forward to getting a new place and having a nice set up like that. Again just a once off thing.
And just for balance, my computer monitor which I use all the time has an annoying flickering issue that I have just been putting up with for a long time.
The trick for most things is to just not spend time and effort to learn what to look for. Happy to see in this thread I am not the only one.
Chances are the music you listen to was recorded, monitored, and mixed using Beyer Dynamic DT100s. They're those white ones you see everyone with in photos of recording studios.
Try a pair. You'll wonder where all the bass has gone. That's because they're not "optimised" or "enhanced" or "MEGA BASS DOOF DOOF DOOF" headphones. It takes a bit of getting used to, like eating less processed food that's not loaded with salt and sugar.
After a bit, you'll realise you can actually hear detail in the bass.
It was right here all along.
I did look at the website of the local IT refurbishing company yesterday, and you can build a completely workable office/development machine (including monitor) for less than I paid for my current 4K display.
In some sense I am a little sad that I didn't just go down the route of refurbished hardware for 20% of the cost, but my eyes probably appreciates it.
Coincidentally I went from being an Audio consumer to a person that developes audio hard- and software, and mixes music in my spare time and deals with live sound in acoustically challenging rooms in my work (to keep things short, I do/did even more).
While I certainly spent some money on audio equipment, I can't say that you need infinitly expensive stuff to enjoy it. For me it went exactly the opposite way. Where as a teenager I thought you need all that expensive stuff to make and listen to music on a high level, I now know what matters and what doesn't.
There is a point beyond which things don't matter factually, because they are beyond the limits of human perception. Audiophiles then trick themselves into hearing the atoms that make up the wire, when every measurement doesn't show anything.
One of my mics I prefer most on floor drums is a modified Pyle Karaoke mic I got from Amazon for 30 bucks and added a cheap transformer into. My headphones are maybe 200 bucks (and half of that was paid for reliability, not for sound quality). I got a second pair for closer to 1200 bicks, but thst is just for retouche work where I need to hear the faintest background noises, I actually prefer the sound of the cheaper ones.
I am still amazed by most recordings I was amazed by when I started on my journey. In fact more so now.
We don't need to inevitably turn everything into a stage to show off our own mental superiority. Especially in the audiophile realm these people claim to hear things that they wouldn't be able to pick out reliably in a properly conducted double-randomized blind test. And everything else is basically worthless since you then just measure a persons ability to fool themselves.
Recently my assistant who just started out in the field came for advice. She wanted to spend some money on a mic and audio interface. And I recommended her one for a quarter of the price she planned on spending since it basically had the same measurements and better software support. As for mics I told her to test my mics with that interface and she should use that test to figure out what she wants. Originally she wanted to spend good money on getting an expensive studio mic, in the test my old dynamic Sennheiser MD21 that I got from ebay won. She got the same for cheap from there as well.
Don't get me wrong, I will be the first to hear bad acoustics, missaligned speakers, a dying loudspeaker suspension, a overdriven amplification system, a missed buffer deadline, a bad mix, a bad recording, phase issues, etc. It is my job to notice. But that doesn't mean I can't enjoy the music running over such a system as much as I did before I knew all that. In fact I might even enjoy it more.
The thing is it does feel good to fix things and upgrade. The treadmill just says your baseline reverts back to where it was. So yeah you're just as happy with the expensive TV as you were with the shitty one, but it did feel good to upgrade, if only for a little while.
So the key is to introduce tiny upgrades and often. If you blow your budget for the whole year on a TV then you only get to be happier once. If you tinker and introduce tiny, sustainable upgrades you can be happier every day.
The sustainable part is important. You can only afford something if you can buy it twice. Don't ever take out a loan to buy anything (apart from a house).
For me, I get dissatisfied and then reach for something nicer and nicer until I hit a limit. I'm just very skeptical he'd still love cheap instant coffee. He was climbing a sort of dopamine ladder. Then he ran out of rungs to climb. Now he has to move to a new thing. Life is almost nothing but impermanence and dissatisfaction. Its a little odd to think you could somehow beat the system. The person who finishes the dopamine ladder would never have been happy staying at the most bottom rung, which was disintegrating for them hence pushing them along to the highest rung. Short of becoming a very serious practitioner in things like meditation and other monastic-type things to fight these urges, this is just a really tough thing to get away from.
Now job, new book, new video game, new movie, new friend, etc. We're almost always doing this in some way.
Maybe those examples are things you don't have good discernment with. For me, I can instantly tell when I have quality headphone speakers. I can hear a fuller range of music than cheap ones. Its almost always obvious and cheap ones are almost always annoying. I have yet to go deeper into audiophone territory and I might never, but I have affordable headphones with really nice speakers inside and I wont go any less quality than this. So maybe for you, you can't tell or don't value it, but there are probably other things you do focus on.
I think there's a saying that you learn decades of music so that you can forget it and just play - fairly similar things here
You learn things to the point of mastery. Mastery proves all the ways things won't work, leaving you with what will.
And often what will work are the fundamentals.
I can give you an example from my experience. I got annoyed by my dull knives, so at first I went and bought really expensive knives, the ones made of hardened high-carbon steel that start rusting if you look at them dirtily. And I spent hours reading reviews before buying them. That's probably the "most expensive cup of coffee" stage.
Then I stumbled upon a Youtube channel that explained how to sharpen knives properly. So I bought $70 worth of diamond sharpening stones and re-sharpened my old IKEA knives. And they started working almost as well as my set of ultra-expensive knives, but they are far more practical. The expensive knife set is now a display piece in my kitchen.
Another revelation for me was that past a certain point, there's really not that much difference in the quality of sushi. It's just rice and sliced fish. Sure, there are individual variations between chefs in rice-to-fish ratio, maybe some special soy sauce here and there, but these are all just matters of personal taste. So I now just enjoy sushi for its taste. And instead of a looking for reservations in expensive restaurants, I just drop by my local sushi place and just ask the chef to add a bit more wasabi to the rice.
Eventually, I just took my knives to a professional sharpener and got the paper-thin, tomato-slicing sharpness I wanted.
Funnily enough, I had both an expensive "forged" knife and a cheap IKEA one, and the IKEA knife was sharper and held its edge much better.
I've watched like 3 hours of his videos on sharpening because he's pragmatic, approachable, and scientific, and now I actually understand how to sharpen a knife and why it works.
It's not at all hard once you understand the idea!
Your advice makes sense when your local options are good enough, but I don't think you're actually arguing that quality doesn't matter -- only that beyond a certain point the additional discernment isn't valuable.
> I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because.
And like the author, I agree that taste is acquired through tinkering and trying to be able to discern the qualities of one approach or one design over another. You can't have good taste in anything without having tried lots of variants in that domain -- wine, sushi, furniture, color, style, etc. Having this quality now is more important than ever for senior devs and mid-level devs that want to reach the next level.
When anyone can vibe code, it is the ones with "good taste" in the design of systems that will thrive. Anyone can use an agent and code fast; few will be able to do it fast and well and build systems that do not eventually collapse under the weight of their own tangled mess.
How to acquire it? Have a folder called `sandbox` and just build small projects in there and try new ideas, new techniques, new libraries you come across. Used a particularly interesting package? Go check out the GitHub repo and see how they did it; learn something new. Good taste can be acquired; it just surprises me how few devs actually care to seek it.
As a concrete example I just reviewed a PR for a feature that someone wanted to add to a flask app. It had a ton of terraform code, an aws api gateway, a lambda, etc. then on the flask app frontend they added a page with a call to this new API. I asked why they didn’t just add a route to the flask app. Blank stare response.
Otherwise you run into the danger of having parts that are peculiar and or obscure to everyone except the one who wrote them. That's if you are lucky, if you are unlucky the person who wrote them won't be able to decode them either.
Everything else is so inconsequential that it truly pains me to see people spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars of their time having to indent, comment, or space things in a certain way just to get CI to pass or merge a PR.
I don’t give a fuck that Jeff wants to use 4-space tabs and I cannot tell you how much I resent spending tens of thousands of dollars of Google’s time pleasing the fucking Go linter or trying to figure out errors like “ERROR: const/var” that I can’t turn off because some master artisan truly finds it meaningful and important to make me declare const blocks before var blocks, and their OCPD and fulltime bikeshedding is more important than whatever actual work I’m trying to do to get them paid.
I generally agree with that sentiment, but the solution is to use automated formatting and lint fixing.
I as a mostly python developer have my gripe with mypy. The powers that be decided all code must pass mypy which means I have to spend hours of their money typing out trivially inferable types because myph can't infer the type of the empty dictionary I just defined when just two lines below I proceed to initialize it. Or it can't infer the return type of my function that returns true in half the return statements and false in the others.
If I wanted to write down types I would use another language. And if I didn't want duck typing I would write somekind of ML. In short I would never write out the types because that's compiler work. But nooooo All the cool kids use mypy and typescript so we have to as well.
However a normal person might actually handle auto formatting in their CICD still requires spending a decent amount of upfront time and ongoing maintenance on running scripts/containers that convert true tabs into 4-spaces tabs. Most of the time, anything that’s fully automatically formattable into something that passes linting is so trivially superficial like reordering or replacing or spacing out things, so if it’s necessary for anything more important than that I’d be questioning things.
I can actually see value in encouraging explicit types for most of the kind of stuff I work on, but I’d never choose Python for them to begin with because of that. LLMs make some of this stuff a lot easier to handle in one shot, but the ceremony and constant implication that you can’t be trusted to good work without being forced to wear a monkey backpack with a leash just wear you down when you run into them consistently over long periods of time.
I wouldn't get caught up in the word "distinctive" to the detriment of losing the larger point about creators being thoughtful and opinionated.
Very sad to me because the building and solving puzzles is the fun part.
(For those not familiar https://thedailywtf.com/)
“He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/america...
"Taste" is just the degree to which two people value the same things.
When someone is rated as having "good taste" it just means that the person rating them values a lot of the same qualities.
The more I thought about it, the more that applies everywhere: Food, wine, clothes, architecture, software design, etc.
A person who doesn't consider themself to have a taste in music and listens casually won't really be able to reason about why they like the music they do other than "I like the band" or "I like the song."
A person with taste in music is going to have listened to a larger variety, be able to speak passionately about it, and justify why they like and dislike particular music.
One is a boneheaded consumer, one is a fanatic.
Similarly with wine, you can't claim you've got taste when you've been drinking only red your whole life.
But wine and music and other subjective consumption-hobbies that enable snobbery are much less grounded in practicality and tend to become arenas for novelty/pure experimentation (charitably) or countersignaling and identity-building (uncharitably). So you end up with situations where the people who “have good taste” consistently associate themselves with music that sounds legitimately bad to regular listeners or never gets popular enough to be recognizable because it’s about being better than casual music listeners more than it is about the music to them. Or, proclaiming that no taste preferences for icecream products are worthy of respect unless they come from someone that regularly consumes pistachio ice cream - it’s not about the ice cream to them.
That’s why we can say “this UI needs to be collapsible and expanded by default” about software - we want it to be a certain way. The type of people who relish in their taste in music and ice cream don’t tend to say things like “maybe cut the bridge 10 seconds and add some kind of duet with reverb” or “it used too much nitrate fertilizer for loamy soil and ended up kind of woody (for ice cream)” because they want themselves to be a certain way.
OTOH music and anything else snob-adjacent aren’t grounded in serving our direct needs to some other end the same way software tends to be, so to them “taste” could be reducible to just a favorite flavor or becomes a kind of status/value/oneupmanship. The products are consumed directly as ends unto themselves so people who have strong opinions on their comparative tastefulness care about that for different reasons than they do software.
It is like the details don't register in a usable way, where one of my good friends will tell me he likes a band because of the guitar tone or the drummer's technique or something else that I struggle to explain or even pick out of the music. I wish I could explain my preference better.
Taste has nothing to do with your awareness of your preference, and cannot exist in a social vacuum.
Taste has everything to do with others opinions of your preference: If your preferences, on display, are enough to bring many others to agree that your preferences are similar to their preferences, you have good taste. If your preferences, when encountered, are enough to bring others preferences into alignment with yours, you have excellent taste. If you can recognise what is the new hotness before anyone else does, you have even better taste. You don't have to be able to justify it, you just have to know it.
You don't need to be aware of this to be happening. You can have incredible taste while just sitting around and doing your own thing.
You can have incredible taste in only red wine without ever tasting white. You can have good taste in only hip-hop and not jazz, or in impressionist art and not abstract expressionism, or any other number of things.
If I know that your recommendation for a category is going to be good, then I know you have good taste.
1. How good or bad something is relative to some standard.
2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things.
One of the greatest developers I've worked with, who I learned a lot from and respect immensely, has extremely different tastes in software from me. To the point where I wouldn't say I think he has good taste.
But, his work still has a distinct style and intention. I can tell anytime I come across libraries he had a hand in. I understand what the code is doing and why is is correct, even when I disagree with it.
And I think that is what is important. When working with more junior people, I'll ask them why they did things a certain way and will generally me be with a "well, idk" of some variant of path dependence.
I think developing that intentionality as a developer is important. Which does come with some amount of aesthetic, and I think taste is a defensible metaphor.
Things I HATE:
1. complaints
2. lists
3. strong opinions
4. hypocrisy> I understood “taste” here to mean opinions.
Good taste is the ability to have nuanced and specific opinions.
This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740478 said it well:
> 2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things.
Combining these two ideas: Taste is the ability to understand the topic/craft/medium well enough to have a strong opinion about what good is, and usually that opinion is similar to other well experienced practitioners.
In software engineering it's the ability to recognize an elegant solution that avoids pitfalls that the observer may have experienced in the past.
In other fields it might be that someone with good taste can better understand and appreciate the process or journey to get to whatever $thing is being evaluated, and they appreciate the $thing more because they can empathize more fully with the creator, compared to a layman.
If taste is being learned, who is the teacher? Are you learning about your own tastes or adopting the tastes of the teacher?
Who has better taste, the user of spaces or tabs? There is no right answer, just those who agree with you and those who don’t.
I think good taste in engineering comes down to a mix of skill and knowledge. It isn't just about how you can reach a goal, but rather about having a solid internal map of the world and an understanding of which parts of the map you are unfamiliar with. To those lacking knowledge, the map can deceptively appear much smaller. Skill allows you to effectively find your way to the places you know you can go. With knowledge and skill, taste comes naturally. Those with bad taste, I've found, are those with limited knowledge of the vast universe of tools available and/or the lack of skill needed to utilize those tools effectively.
Still, I love the tinkering spirit, and it still is a part of me, but it's not very pragmatic to implement in my life nowadays.
Coding for others is not art, it does not have much meaning in of itself. Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works.
In a world like that where you have to work in a team, why you ever wear your inflexibility as a badge of pride? The ones who are the most useful are the ones who can code any way, any how, and can plugin anywhere - "taste" be damned. If you want to be a net positive on the teams you work on, stop thinking it's about you, because it's not.
It absolutely is, and I think it's what separates good from bad and junior from senior devs.
Most devs can produce an artifact that more or less works. But one that has an internal consistency others can understand and extend, one which accurately captures the problem as it exists and ways it will likely change, is much more of an art form.
A big part of that is knowing which situations are worth making a stand. Every you write code or leave feedback, your doing it for your team current and future.
You shouldn't strive for internal consistency with yourself, you should strive for external consistency with the other developers in your team. If someone reads your code and immediately knows it was you, you probably aren't doing a good job.
And that's the difference. If you are doing a good job as a software engineer, no one should notice you. If you're making good art, everyone should see you. And that is the difference between devs who think they're good, and devs who are truly good.
I see code more like rocks, nails, planks, tape, shards of broken glass, and a pile of signs that say things like RADIOACTIVE - DO NOT ENTER. If you need to do something cool with that stuff you probably do need to create something that looks pretty interesting and elegant in spite of your choice in building materials. But sometimes you just need to take a NO TRESPASSING sign and tape it to a plank that you jam into a pile of rocks. Don’t need to find a hammer if you don’t use nails, only need it up for a day, just one of a hundred things on your plate to do something of bigger scope and impact - just make sure the rocks are big enough to keep the plank standing, leave and forget about it.
Yeah, but if the patch is unreadable slop, some tasteful choices that make the code more maintainable will make features and bugfixes come faster for users and number go up for the business.
Readability also has some level of objectiveness to it. There's only so many ways you can abstract a concept, and so many ways you can express logic.
In that sense, readability has way more to do with skill in abstraction, than taste. In fact picking bad abstraction layers or expressing logic in odd manners because of taste is a great way to write unreadable slop.
This is related to what Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance calls the romantic (subjective, "artistic") and the classical (objective, "scientific") understanding. He, too, points that the ideal is to enjoy both. Not because there are both useful and have their place and time, but because this is a false dichotomy to begin with and, ideally, one should refrain from defining the splitting and abandon both concepts (after all, the Zen in the title is there for a reason).
1. It can easily devolve into meaningless tweaking (see author's point about touching dotfiles) which can still be satisfying but not very impactful. 2. It's hard to maintain motivation when something stops being fun. This is where external motivators like bosses, clients and scoreboards (e.g. Advent of Code) are actually valuable...
I suspect it's a generational gap.
body::after {
content: "";
position: fixed;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 1px, transparent 1px);
background-size: 2px 2px;
background-repeat: repeat;
pointer-events: none;
z-index: 9999;
} body::after {
content: "";
position: fixed;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 1px, transparent 1px);
background-size: 2px 2px;
background-repeat: repeat;
...So I get to be very particular, but also not have to care about tweaking, I did all the work back when I had time for that.
I will argue that if you stare at a screen for hours a day, might as well make it pleasant with good hinting/anti-aliasing/features and a professional font instead of Dejavu Sans lol
s=document.createElement('style');
s.textContent='body::after{display: none !important}';
document.body.appendChild(s)tinkering is good when you're < 30 or maybe even < 25
From TFA.
If you don't want to tinker, don't! But it's absurd to suggest that it's only something for children to enjoy. (30 should not be considered near the end of your life btw.) Please don't tell others they should feel bad about learning for fun because they're adults.
Something I say about complainers applies here:
In the entire history of the world not one thing has ever gotten better by accepting something as it is.
Go ahead and never tinker, but don't delude yourslef it's a virtue. It's merely something you're free to do because it doesn't actively harm anyone else.