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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

#271

Post by MrTortoise »

jodrellblank wrote: post #165
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…

> " All of this, to dabble in code " I'm not a professional programmer, and when my laptop takes 10 minutes to start moving the mouse cursor smoothly after waking from a weekend suspend (today!), I'm pointing fingers at you all, the professional "dabblers" who don't understand computers, don't understand firewalls, don't understand databases, don't understand algorithms, don't understand garbage collectors, don't und…

most of what developers have to ship is not in their control - very often teams are not responsible for defining what they do or how they do it now.

I wish you were right because it can be fixed by looking at developers but its the entire snake oil industry of deciding what to do that is the problem

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

#272

Post by MrTortoise »

boring_twenties wrote: post #253
jimbokun wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the red tape blocking developers from actually working on fixing the problems you describe.

Yet curiously, there doesn't seem to be any red tape blocking them (us) from pushing out broken changes that no one wanted in the first place? This seems to be an increasingly common theme these days. Some harebrained thing is released seemingly with no review or testing whatsoever, just because some dev (or worse, a "UI/UX expert") decided they wanted to. It breaks some existing use case and suddenly we need a 2, 5…

exactly because delivery experts put in PR processes and QA processes in different teams to do this

complete abdication of responsibility

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

#273

Post by quacked »

mech422 wrote: post #191
quacked wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never met an organization staffed with rational actors that had more than like 8 people in it, so you're not wrong. I think what I'm getting is that ultimately every edict that flows downward into the layers of management and engineers is centered around increasing perceived profit for shareholders. Any department, project, etc. at large enough organizations was ultimately greenlit for the sake of possibly makin…

>> I've never met an organization staffed with rational actors that had more than like 8 people in it, so you're not wrong. LOL - I like that, I'm stealing that line :-) I disagree with 'was ultimately greenlit...'. Seems like quite a lot of them are greenlit to improve someone's political position within the organization. (often, despite being told it will be a net negative for the organization as a whole) Things li…

Oh--I see what you're getting at. Yeah, I understand and agree. I'll have to say my point with that caveat in the future. I'm glad you liked my joke!

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

#274

Post by moomoo11 »

Join a start up or start your own company.

You’re gonna have this issue you’re talking about at any company that has more than like 200 engineers. At that scale you’re solving both technical and organizational problems. Remember. More people, more politics. They don’t send in a Marine battalion to get Osama, they send in a few highly trained Navy SEALs who can do the quick, efficient, and dirty work.

As for “complexity” don’t confuse actual software design patterns with shitcode that 99% of average software engineers shit out.

Read Clean Code, Clean Architecture, and Designing Data Intensive Applications if you’re serious about becoming a better software engineer. Otherwise anyone can write some garbage code that solves the problem at hand. That’s not hard.

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

#275

Post by cloverich »

weatherlite wrote: post #104
kardianos wrote: post #15

> Any project I work on is connected to a million different tools, workflows and services, I was just skimming and read that, and I thought "he is working in Javascript" and yep, later on that's it. I stay away from the Javascript/TS ecosystem (npm et al). I program mostly in Go, but also quite a bit in Typescript. I would learn/use (even if for personal projects) more boring tech stacks, like Java/C#/Go/PL-SQL/T-SQL…

You're just lucky to work in a company with a good codebase. I'm sure there's plenty toxic environments with shitty codebases written in Go where you wouldn't like working there at all. You're giving too much credit to how much the programming language matters imo.

You are correct to an extent, but its a fallacy to assume the language and tooling have no impact on the culture or people it attracts. Go is very specifically not "elegant", it has a stdlib where npm has hundreds of dependencies which differ between projects. Errors in JS (Ruby, etc) can come from unexpected places, but the code can elegantly hide them. In Go they are in your face at all times -- but then they rarely surprise you. etc. Its a series of trade offs that are more than simple choices IMO, they target and attract different audiences. And to an extent many people will likely gel better with one than the other. Its only a piece of the puzzle to be sure and the people and company matter more, but I strongly disagree that languages / frameworks matter little. I think those with big differences (Node/Ruby vs Go) there's probably a substantial difference in "average" workplace culture.

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

#276

Post by sliken »

kurtbuilds wrote: post #38

You are anxious about things constantly breaking, and you work in Javascript. No surprise. Try learning Rust. Your anxiety of things constantly breaking will disappear. I've been coding for about 20 years. My joy of coding would be gone if not for Rust. Instead, writing code is my primary hobby today, in addition to it being (part of) my job professionally.

I do feel like technology has let the public down. Ransomware, identity theft, fake news, social media, etc. Things like memory safety used to be discussed in the most technical of circles. However computer security is impacting society as a whole, seems like the entire planet has had their identity stolen. Now Congress, NSA, CISA, and even Consumer Reports are discussing memory safety. Sure Rust is a small piece of secure computing, but it's a step in the right direction.

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

#277

Post by marcus_holmes »

cnity wrote: post #130
marcus_holmes wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stay away from all the JS dependency bullshit as much as possible. I use vanilla JS & CSS wherever possible, usually in a Go template. If I have to create a SPA then I use Vue - I've found it's the least complex of the front-end frameworks. I build it using ESBuild from the flat JS files downloaded from the Vue site and stay as far from yarn/npm as possible. I'm trying to work out how to compile Go to WASM and mani…

Any Go WASM solution will come with big performance costs and complexity that are worth considering: 1. Since WASM doesn't yet expose a feature to share GC with the host, the GC functionality with necessarily be bundled with your outputted code, making your WASM size larger than ideal. 2. All calls from WASM have to go through a JS layer in order to interact with the Web APIs anyway, so now you actually have _two_ GC…

I'm not bothered about GC's - the size is a problem, but I've never had to worry about GC performance issues yet.

Everything else is spot on, that's the pain!

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

#279

Post by aprdm »

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?

One example can be to target many different OSes/CPU architecture / GPUs architecture.

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

#280

Post by bmitc »

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…

Source code control is important, but Git is not the only source code control system.
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