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Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

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Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#261

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

hacb wrote: post #150
digitalsushi wrote: post #58

The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…

Fun to read this comment, as I'm part of the team that deployed the exact same measure as for your wife: we now shutdown dev environments each day at 8PM. We decided to do so because over the weeks, we saw that a lot of devs "forgot" about their dev envs and they were up & running for 6+ months for absolutely nothing. On the other side, we are constantly requested to reduce infra costs, and dev environments (even unu…

How much does it cost to have a single environment running overnight?

Not shutting down my machine saves me 2-5 minutes probably. Which seems like it might be worth a few pennies, but I hate the waste and environmental costs of wasted energy.

What we really need is a program that shuts off a devs environment, but then can boot it back up 5 minutes before they start working and somehow open all the applications that were running back to the exact state they were in before shutting down..

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#262

Post by wizhi »

hacb wrote: post #216
ericd wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't this be done by giving the devs some transparency into how it's killing their team's budget and reminders, instead, so that they'd manage this themselves? Because this sounds super frustrating to deal with.

We kind of already have. We built a CLI that allows them to create/update/delete/list all their dev envs, so they have all the tooling needed. Also, we are still a small/medium sized company, so we often had the chance to talk with them to expose this issue, but in the end it never really worked.

> we are still a small/medium sized company

Sorry this is somewhat off-topic, but _why_ do you have virtual development machines?

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#263

Post by the_only_law »

_trackno5 wrote: post #228

Take this as constructive advice: stop expecting your job to be fulfilling. Yes, most jobs are filled with corporate drudgery. Business doesn't generally require tough (technical) problems to be solved. The point of business is always to make money by serving the customer. You need to find a way to thrive in that environment otherwise you'll just drown. I work on boring-ass bank payment stuff. I spend my days writing…

> Instead I look at my job as a way to make loads of money and get better at my social skills, and outside of work I do the hard cool technical work I want to do.

This was my previous job… sort of. It paid well enough that I was going to use it to ultimately save enough money to get out and pursue other things.

But then I got laid off. And now the market is looking so destitute, and the money looks like it will dry up for people like me. Without the money there’s nothing to keep me around except for the fact that it’s too late to do something else (at least anything worth doing).

I never even planned to go into software development as a career, definitely not initially. It just happened to be a good ticket for a young uneducated person who needed to pay rent, and had hacked around a lot in the past.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#264

Post by hacb »

wizhi wrote: post #262
hacb wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We kind of already have. We built a CLI that allows them to create/update/delete/list all their dev envs, so they have all the tooling needed. Also, we are still a small/medium sized company, so we often had the chance to talk with them to expose this issue, but in the end it never really worked.

> we are still a small/medium sized company Sorry this is somewhat off-topic, but _why_ do you have virtual development machines?

We currently have ~40 microservices running (for the same number of devs), and having the full stack on a laptop is not possible. Especially with 80% of the devs having MacBook and Docker in a VM.

Also, this allow us (the infra folks) to chose how devs will work (partially), so it's easier for us to debug when they have issues because we do not have to deal with custom Makefiles etc.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#265

Post by throwaway020623 »

ragnarsson wrote: post #132
throwaway020623 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have several side projects where I use a simple Spring Boot backend and I feel I can focus more on the fun part (solving problems). It just works! There is also a huge eco system of good quality open source libraries compared to some of the newer backend languages. This feeling is absent from React-based apps. The React eco system has been around for many years now, but is missing many of the advantages age typical…

My experience with React has been different hence commenting here. That is just not true. I have used react with nextjs in the past but moved to remix. Moving to a new framework requires you to learn it, quite similar to learning a new language but it is much better than manually creating webpack loaders. I had a decent experience with nextjs but my experience with remix has been better. I used Spring Boot at work an…

I think we have different ideas about what a good development environment is, and that is ok. We have our preferences and we can't argue with that.

I would like to comment on how you feel Java compilation is slow. Incremental compilation while developing is fast and doesn't affect my productivity (your experience may differ).

Triggering a single threaded full build with one of my services (1000+ files and 80k lines) took less than 30 seconds on my laptop (18s with parallel compilation). But I never do that locally, as incremental compilations are almost instant.

If you need to download dependencies and run tests, the number is higher, but that is not specific for Java

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#266

Post by throwaway_586 »

nicbou wrote: post #258
throwaway_586 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you willing to share any more details about how you made this happen? A lot of what you wrote really resonated with me. There's a side project I've been working on for 2 years (and hope to monetize soon) and even though the honeymoon phase of "new project" is well past, I still am so excited to work on it every day. But I *hate* work, for all the reasons you and others in this thread have mentioned. Recently it's…

The trick is to get lucky once. There's nothing more to it. It was a work of love that panned out. If I had to start again tomorrow, I'd probably really struggle to reproduce that success.

That's a very honest assessment, thanks. Hope to be in similar shoes to yours one day.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#267

Post by piva00 »

hacb wrote: post #264
wizhi wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are still a small/medium sized company Sorry this is somewhat off-topic, but _why_ do you have virtual development machines?

We currently have ~40 microservices running (for the same number of devs), and having the full stack on a laptop is not possible. Especially with 80% of the devs having MacBook and Docker in a VM. Also, this allow us (the infra folks) to chose how devs will work (partially), so it's easier for us to debug when they have issues because we do not have to deal with custom Makefiles etc.

Is it really needed to have 40 microservices for 40 devs? What I mean is that you generally scale out to so many services when you need each to have variable scalability, so each part of the system can scale up/down as necessary.

If you don't need this, all these services could be written as larger modules, with proper separation of concerns but easy to be deployed as a single piece. Collect some stuff that are similar in domain and create a well designed monolith. Easier for operations, easier for devs to maintain. Dependencies upgrades aren't a nightmare, or you need very good tooling to not create toil (which generally a small operation won't have).

Just throwing this in the wind because it sounds pretty heavy for a 40-body shop to be carrying as many services, at least I don't see the benefits unless for the aforementioned scalability advantage.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#268

Post by piva00 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #204
frabjoused wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, set up your dev environment? And if you were just setting up your dev environment your working tree wouldn't be dirty. Your impossibly pessimistic scenario is sadly impossible.

There literally is not a problem on this list I have not run into in my real life career. If setting up your environment requires all this, your environment is too complicated. But unfortunately, many production projects require environments this complicated.

Software has a multitude of tools. All scattered and disassembled.

I'm getting close to 2 decades working with software, every shop I worked that had at least some investment in streamlining tooling/developer experience has been invigorating. They are too few and far apart though.

Larger companies tend to develop layers and layers of tooling when striving for streamlining the dev experience. Unfortunately they become opaque boxes to obfuscate the complexity of the machinery. Leaky abstractions are inevitable and you will end up having to debug some internal tooling, going into the deep rabbit hole of figuring out how the machinery actually works to fix your issue.

It can be frustrating but a little rewarding the first few times, later it just becomes extremely boring as the knowledge isn't even transferable.

The smaller companies with good automation are some the most fun places I worked at. It's easy to be more creative when you aren't debugging a strange error code and the last mention to it is in some lost chat of 4 years ago. Always a fun time...

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#269

Post by _trackno5 »

the_only_law wrote: post #263
_trackno5 wrote: post #228

Take this as constructive advice: stop expecting your job to be fulfilling. Yes, most jobs are filled with corporate drudgery. Business doesn't generally require tough (technical) problems to be solved. The point of business is always to make money by serving the customer. You need to find a way to thrive in that environment otherwise you'll just drown. I work on boring-ass bank payment stuff. I spend my days writing…

> Instead I look at my job as a way to make loads of money and get better at my social skills, and outside of work I do the hard cool technical work I want to do. This was my previous job… sort of. It paid well enough that I was going to use it to ultimately save enough money to get out and pursue other things. But then I got laid off. And now the market is looking so destitute, and the money looks like it will dry u…

I’m sorry you got laid off and i understand you may feel down right now, But there are a few things in your comment that are concerning.

First, the market sucks at the moment but there’s no reason the money will dry up for you. Keep your skills up, practice for the interviews and you’ll be good.

Don’t get into this mindset that it’s too late to do something worth doing. The only time it’s too late is when you’re dead. Do you really wanna go through life with this kind of self-pity? Who the heck cares if could’ve done something different earlier? You already spent those life years and you ain’t getting them back. The only way is forward.

If you were good enough to get a well paying job, you’re definitely good enough to grind till you get where you want to be.

My next piece of advice is to stop thinking you’ll be able to save enough to quit and do something else. You won’t. The situation will never be ideal and you’ll just have to commit and do it.

Sure build some cushion, ideally use the money you save to generate you some income (e.g., buy a rental property), but you’ll still have to make the jump.

The only way you’ll make it is by believing you can do it in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#270

Post by MrTortoise »

ElKrist wrote: post #234
bmitc wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this passes the buck a little. There are a lot of problems created by software engineers and software engineers alone. There are of course management problems, but that happens in every field. Software isn't special in that regard. My issue with software is that, in general, the software industry is both myopic, clinging to some bygone coding aesthetic of the 80s, and discontented, constantly creating new stu…

I'm curious about your opinion on Git. It's actually a tool I'm excited to teach to non-developer people who deal with text documents and the need to keep a history, multiple versions etc. I'm aware that now these features are integrated in some common offices apps so there's less of a need for Git there. However what's wrong about Git for code? How would you cover the same features differently? When I say "Git" I re…

its like using the army to watch over kids crossing the road to school Many other source control systems with far simpler systems

this whole branch and pr into merge process didn't exist 10 years ago like it does now. It started from open source and low trust - but nobody stopped to ask what problem it solves.

If somebody needs to check your code as part of a formal process - rather than some arbitrary invitation you issue in special cases - you shouldn't of been hired with the job of writing code.

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