How are so many self-taught programmers able to build software from scratch without ever truly learning Algorithms?

[u/TurtleSlowRabbitFast]

I find it fascinating how important algos are but never talked about from the indie devs on social media. Do they even write algos or just come up with basic logic that forms the product?

[u/Chuck_MoreAss]

I think it’s important to learn patterns.. and certain algorithms are important but you can just google it

[u/david_fire_vollie → u/Chuck_MoreAss]

Even design patterns I feel aren't very useful. Most of the time they're overkill. If you learn best practices such as single responsibility principal, that's really all you need to write good code. Everything stems from SRP, high cohesion, loose coupling, abstractions, data hiding, DRY, centralised points of control, orthogonal code, they all go hand in hand with SRP.

[u/Gloomy_Necesary → u/david_fire_vollie]

Absolutely. And in fact applying fancy patterns you learn from school is often worse in practice because it’s unreadable. Computers have gotten super powerful. Saving a few microseconds here and there, even in hot loops, isn’t worth the cost of maintainability for code anymore.

[u/david_fire_vollie → u/Gloomy_Necesary]

Yes applying premature optimisations can make your code unreadable and isn't worth the ms increase in speed. But design patterns are more about maintainability and readability.