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Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

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Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#211

Post by celticmusic »

javajosh wrote: post #9

Three things: voting down a move to microservices, identifying a fundamental flaw in a core data-structure that is the high-level impetus for future refactorings, and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop. Unfortunately, I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though, to the point it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. Despite know…

> and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop.

The ole eyebrow started twitching when I read this. I once had a 6 month contract with a RoR shop where they had such bad performance issues they started developing in production mode so it wouldn't reload everything constantly. This allowed you to make some changes quickly, but 90% of everything required you to restart the web server and it literally took minutes for it to load everything. They had close to 200 rubygems, and I've always guessed that was the core of the issue.

When I suggested we need to fix that issue, the senior did-an-internship-here-last-summer developer got extremely passive aggressive with me (I didn't renew that contract). This guy thought he was amazing, I remember him arguing with me about a bug where they were storing decimal numbers as float in MySQL. I seriously had a 30 minute long conversation where he told me repeatedly I was wrong until I finally got exasperated, made the changes, and it fixed the bug. The guy was couldn't believe it fixed the issue and spent another couple of hours looking for why I was wrong.

I've never touched RoR again, that experience was horrific.

Sometimes you can't help the slowness, but I know I seriously dislike header-only libraries in C++ specifically because of their effect on the BTD loop. I have no idea how people can tolerate working like that, it's a slow hell for me.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#212

Post by celticmusic »

_TwoFinger wrote: post #166
javajosh wrote: post #9

Three things: voting down a move to microservices, identifying a fundamental flaw in a core data-structure that is the high-level impetus for future refactorings, and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop. Unfortunately, I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though, to the point it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. Despite know…

> I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though Encountering these in my very first programming job made me learn make(1). The thing is, I'm not very bright and my work "style" involves a fair share of trial and error. Obviously, all this waiting prevented me from doing my thing, so I eventually rewrote the whole build system just so I can do more trial-and-error. I've always considered my dependency o…

it's not a weakness, it's productive. Anyone writing a lot of code without testing it is doing things in a subpar manner. This isn't about intelligence.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#213

Post by celticmusic »

Aperocky wrote: post #132
javajosh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software development is the BTD loop; you can't eliminate it. I got my start with Logo[1], which has an amazing BTD loop! People like Bret Victor[2] have talked at length about it (although Victor doesn't use that term, IIRC). Even the trend toward "notebook programming" - Jupyter, Observable, etc are really about shortening that loop. A major reason to use an IDE is to potentially shorten the BTD loop. Lots and lots…

Well, I don't see how linters/test on a final cluster is bad. This is why we have unit/integration/alpha/canary tests. The first 1 can happen on my laptop over 5 seconds while the second can happen on my personal instance over 20 minutes. Usually first means the second will pass and I just need to run it in the background without breaking any workflows. i.e. It might not be a bad feedback loop, you just need more of…

5 seconds is already painful, the point of the other poster is to delay that stuff until the end. When the BTD loop is long it's a looooooot harder to get into the flow, and you have difficult really thinking about the problem.

Imagine trying to read a novel but after every paragraph you had to stop and wait for 5-10 seconds.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#214

Post by celticmusic »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #66
Stronico wrote: post #56

1. Setting aside a "20% day" to develop infrastructure - I went through a slow period about 15 years ago where I had the option of doing this without meaningful tradeoffs and I built some software that I still use to this day. It's tempting to call this a learning, or reading day but I've found that I lose focus if I have a full day to do that - if you decide that you will spend 8 consecutive hours building a persona…

Setting aside your own time for learning and your own agenda is so crucial. The sad reality is that most orgs which run on a ticket/sprint process will make room for nothing outside of tickets. Looking back at my previous gig, the biggest mistake we consistently made (but were somehow impotent to correct), was assuming that all of the “we should”’s which came out of post-mortems or brainstorming sessions would someho…

> The sad reality is that most orgs which run on a ticket/sprint process will make room for nothing outside of tickets.

I actively try to stay away from this for this reason. I understand that these ticketing systems are used for coordination and communication, but there's a downside to going all in on them.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#215

Post by therealdrag0 »

kqr wrote: post #168
desc wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's why these cost me a few weekends... if it's done in my Free Time(TM) they don't have to know about the unsuccessful ones.

I'm sure this works fine for you, but I would in general not recommend that people do work on their spare time. The reason to do that is, as you point out, that you get to take all the risk, and your company gets all the profit. That's not, generally, a healthy employment relationship and as an employer, I would be pissed if I found out someone did that. Just carve out an hour every day from your salaried time to chi…

Eh. The effect could be the same. I average less than 8 hour work days. But once every 2 months or so I throw myself at a problem at work I personally fee strongly about. This might spill into a late-night or weekend. But I like the rush of it and I get a lot of appreciation at work and it has materially benefited my career. Once I even got an on the spot bonus issues from the CTO for fixing a perf problem.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#216

Post by vs4vijay »

jml7c5 wrote: post #204
Onawa wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good lord, what possible workflow leads you to having that many open tabs without bookmarking them or using some other plugin that allows you better tab management? Seems like a recipe for disaster, especially since you said you end up having to dig through backups to restore state.

There's a middle-ground between bookmarks ("permanent" storage where it feels like you're archiving the page), live tabs (obvious issues), and "to read" lists (which are better for a stream of content that you know you want to read but can't get to yet), that isn't served by current approaches. Firefox Preview (Android) had a really good idea with "collections", where you essentially save tabs into groups that were v…

Ditto, I do the same everyday. I once had ~700 tabs opened and I usually skim through them in a 2 days to 1 week.

So I have enabled "Restore previous session" option in firefox and sometime I manually crash the firefox so the next time I open the browser it asks to me restore the 700+ tabs but they won't be consuming the memory because they are inactive and when you click on them, then only it loads the contents and consume memory.

This is how my tabs looks: https://snipboard.io/AUQ3kj.jpg

Also, I use multiple profiles of firefox and having them as separate applications like this: https://snipboard.io/mXUCqp.jpg

PS: I don't use chrome or electron based apps as they are memory hogger.

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