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The Metaprogrammer

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Re: The Metaprogrammer

#131

Post by dev360 »

kabdib wrote: post #123

My group at Microsoft was notorious for not spending money on hardware. I did some math. If the money they spent halved my build time (easily possible at the time, since we were on spinning rust and they wouldn't spring for SSDs "because everyone will want one, and then what?") then they could afford to buy me a new computer every couple of weeks, more often if you computed the $ lost from the average imputed load (o…

This happened to me at Citrix. I had to bring in more ram to put in the computer because it was just unbearable to run Visual Studio. Some places don't give a crap, you just throw more people at the problem.

Re: The Metaprogrammer

#132

Post by AstralStorm »

ontouchstart wrote: post #50
livarot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audiophiles - probably the most prominent example of them all.

The opposite is real musicians.

You would be surprised then by how snooty some musicians are about gear.

You don't have a vetted guitar, amplifier, mixer or a microphone? Yep.

That said, they sometimes have a point.

Re: The Metaprogrammer

#133

Post by AstralStorm »

zuzuleinen wrote: post #17

For me a chair is important. I don't really care about perks and other stuff but knowing that I sit around 8 hours every day for a couple years in a good chair is as important for me as the work station. And in most of the startups I worked so far there were only cheap chairs not so good for my back. In a way I understand the owners: they have startup they should buy the cheapest things possible because they don't kn…

Silly people who don't understand that furniture can be loaned or leased.

Maybe you won't get something cutting edge in economics, but definitely very good still.

Re: The Metaprogrammer

#134

Post by noir_lord »

sagischwarz wrote: post #31

This effect is observable not only in the programming community, but in many others. Best example would be photography, where people spend much more time discussing their equipment and the newest lenses instead of going out and actually take pictures. I had to experience this for myself when searching for new hobbies. With most of them, I spent most time with the meta, e.g., which fountain pen to use for my writing o…

Add Chess to that list, people argue constantly about which is the best set and which style of pieces are the right ones.

I just bought a 20 dollar vinyl board and some plastic touranment staunton pieces from ebay - the exact same ones the local chess club uses.

I'm also into Cycling and it's much the same there as well, My carbon bike was £800 and I ride it 2-3 times a week, I have friends who spent £4000 and ride it once a month (and have to have full carbon everything) always struck me as crazy but it's their money.

Re: The Metaprogrammer

#135

Post by noir_lord »

caseymarquis wrote: post #66
tempodox wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm not a decent programmer but I definitely don't want multiple screens. I would perceive such a set-up as unergonomic and creating too many distractions. Nothing against the rest, though.

Probably has more to do with preference and what you're working with. In Web programming having a debugger, the rendered page and your code all up is really nice. I actually have 3 monitors for this. Doing other stuff you can have stackoverflow, your code, and a gui for version control. Doesn't hurt to have the extra real estate for command lines, file explorers, email, a crm, remote support sessions, etc. I think I…

1 -> 2 made a huge difference for me.

2 -> 3 much less (so much so I went from 3 to 2 at home because I wanted the desk space back).

Working on one screen for webdev though is frustrating I agree, I hate working from my laptop now.

Re: The Metaprogrammer

#136

Post by soundwave106 »

equalarrow wrote: post #96
livarot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audiophiles - probably the most prominent example of them all.

I have a friend like this. I've been in bands in the past and worked in (even built my own) studios. I seen and partaken the 24/96 vs. 16/48 debate (spoiler: that only matters in the studio). I've worked with high end mics, pres, dacs, boards, tape, etc. The big thing we tangle on is always digital vs. analog. Oh boy.... Zzzzz... I've cut tape and editing on analog sucks. Noise on analog is not ideal. Compression and…

My theory about audiophiles is that a lot of them grew up in the 1970s-1990s where there really was a huge difference between "high end" and consumer grade audio. That gap has narrowed considerably. I think there's also a lot more people these days out there actually explaining the engineering and science in good audio (in the old days technical details were considerably harder to look up), this makes it hard to push "marketing oriented" product (eg those infamous audiophile cables). My impression currently is that the audiophile hobby kind of was dying off.

I do think there's a few areas where analog still is a bit better technically (mostly from the musician perspective, things such as distortion and resonant filters), but digital is both often better and just so much more convenient for 90% of things. Those that embrace analog as a religion are rather annoying.

Now, I do remember in the 1980s there was a huge push of digital everything -- digital playback, "digitally remastered", etc. A fair bit of that at the time had major issues -- eg not very nice sounding DA stages, aliasing problems, etc. Perhaps this is where some of this attitude comes from.

Re: The Metaprogrammer

#137

Post by gbog »

falcolas wrote: post #115
gbog wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building, editing, testing, all of that is better done remotely with ssh and gnu screen or similar.

I personally disagree. That requires that you use vim or emacs, which is not feasable (or even desirable) for many programmers. It also requires a stable and low latency network connection; something which is not always available. Anecdotally, I had to work this way once for an employer. It worked rather well, but our "development" machines were on-premises, and when they went down, everybody was down. I was also ext…

Use vim or emacs not feasible? not desirable? If most of the greatest programmers use them, if you're a wannabe programmer how would you not use these tools? It's like willing to be a cowboy but for thanks to the horse and the gun...

Re: The Metaprogrammer

#138

Post by gbog »

wtbob wrote: post #118
gbog wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building, editing, testing, all of that is better done remotely with ssh and gnu screen or similar.

> Building, editing, testing, all of that is better done remotely with ssh and gnu screen or similar. Why? I have a full command line suite running on my laptop, because I'm running Linux. Why would I log in elsewhere, when I can run stuff locally?

For many reasons. The remote server is in a data center, supposedly better maintained than your PC, it has backups, RAIDx all the stuff. If you automate some tasks, or run long-lasting scripts, it is much more reliable. Also, keeping it in the terminal forces you to use the right tools, e.g. vim/emacs instead of the good old Dreamweaver...

Re: The Metaprogrammer

#139

Post by pjc50 »

gbog wrote: post #137
falcolas wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally disagree. That requires that you use vim or emacs, which is not feasable (or even desirable) for many programmers. It also requires a stable and low latency network connection; something which is not always available. Anecdotally, I had to work this way once for an employer. It worked rather well, but our "development" machines were on-premises, and when they went down, everybody was down. I was also ext…

Use vim or emacs not feasible? not desirable? If most of the greatest programmers use them, if you're a wannabe programmer how would you not use these tools? It's like willing to be a cowboy but for thanks to the horse and the gun...

If you're writing C# you'll be much faster with intellisense and autocomplete. It's quite amazing how much help it is, especially before you reach expert level.

Occasionally you encounter weird toolchains where some stuff is much more convenient to do from the IDE, so you end up editing files in emacs then having Quartus or Vivado open to look at their reports.

(People should be a bit more specific about their working environment before confidently declaring the best way to do things!)

Re: The Metaprogrammer

#140

Post by collyw »

xapata wrote: post #126
collyw wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I don't mind working on an average machine. I don't do anything with huge computing needs, and it shows where the bottlenecks are before they get into production. (Then the disk starts paging and I change my mind about having a better machine).

Compute, I don't care about. Screen space is precious. Every extra window I can have open simultaneously increases my productivity.

True, though for me its the keyboard. I can't seem to get into the flow on a laptop, despite the fact the resolution is better than my larger monitor.
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