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Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
161–170 of 271 posts
Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
#162I would fault this article for treating each developer as a being intrinsically good or bad. I've seen people I know are very talented (based on past work) become negative developers. Depression is a common cause. If they are underperforming they may react to their own self-disappointment by acting defensive and resisting change of the inclusion of anyone they think may judge them. I think there's many destructive fe…
Thanks for verbalizing the unease I felt after reading the article. I would have been unable to express it so well.
Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
#163This article is the stuff of Imposter Syndrome nightmares.
Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
#164> one influential developer didn’t like any kind of change and they were allowed to veto any forward progress I'm a little skeptical, it feels like I'm only hearing one side of a story. How does the author justify the characterization "didn’t like any kind of change".
The unwritten assumption is the influential dev. had less say so with the streamlined process which thereby would reduce their power in the company.
could be, but I assume a dev with veto power would be a senior dev?
Did they just say "No! I don't like change", with arms crossed; or did they have more to say about their reasons?
We only hear the authors conclusions, not the original evidence; yet usually 'veto powers' are given and respected for a reason.
Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of that apart from 5 is totaly wrong
What's the solution for source controlled database logic?
Back when I was writing Python and using Django, I found the migrations system provided by django-south was really good for exactly this.
A migration was a way to roll a database forwards or backwards; there were tools to create simple ones, and one was able to write whatever Python & SQL one wished in order to handle more complex cases. One might even archive off a column somewhere when deleting it, and load it up back when restoring it, if one wished.
Since the migrations were all just source code, they were perfectly well-suited to source control.
It was a really powerful system; I'm surprised that it hasn't seen wider acceptance.
Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the problem with source controlled database logic? Have your statements (including those that create stored procedures on setup, migrations, etc) on text files, and just load those into your Git or whatever.
The problem is ensuring deployment matches up. It's very easy to end up with subtle differences between a newly deployed database instance and a database instance that was deployed with an old version and then updated. For code you would think very hard before deploying each version as a patch to the previous version - it's easy and effective to just deploy the code afresh each time, with a complete artifact built fr…
I don't understand what's hard about mass-overwriting your previous stored procedures with new ones.
You're right about non-SProc code; just deploy all of it. Do the same thing with SProc code!
What's tough about keeping all your code in files that start with "CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION ", and just firing them all at the DB (within a transaction, if you like)?
I don't actively advocate putting all the code in sprocs, but I can see advantages. I also don't advocate using PHP, and yet people demonstrably build some great websites with it.
Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain why you feel that "do everything in the database" is archaic? A lot of logic (especially authentication logic) can be put in the database only. Not to mention that I won't trust anything that only has application level security, and nothing at database level to check/limit it.
Absolutely. SQL is great, and having the DB just give you the correct data from the get go is convenient. But in the case where complex logic is necessary, SQL is much more difficult for correct implementation than something more expressive. You _could_ delve into cursors or long merge statements or what have you, but in business logic specifically, the code will be read and altered numerous times by several differen…
Write your stored procedures in any language you like. Postgres supports pgSQL, Tcl, Perl, and Python out of the box, with third-party bindings for some other languages.
When procedural coding is necessary, use a procedural language, in your stored procedures. What's the problem?
Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
#168Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
#169Good points. Regarding how such people come to influence, you have to remember a lot of people, especially in startups, are not hired through a process at all. I worked with a guy for many years who was as described in this article. He can't code and he can't do any math, despite holding a phd. He can talk about math and he can talk about code, but we're talking excel level skills when what you need is someone with a…
> First of all, the boss of the fund did not have the skills to judge who could write a trading strategy, and who couldn't. So he was stuck with recommendations from other people who also didn't have this skill, leading to this hire.
Which is why it's important for managers to understand the technology that they're managing.
I ran into this 25 years ago. I knew someone who went to an MBA school. He spoke up at a party and said "I now have great management skills and can manage anyone!". My response was "No, because when you have a technical disagreement in the team, as manager, you have to make the final decision. And if you don't understand the issues, you're left deciding based on what, popularity of the engineers involved?"
Re: Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
#170Who is the professor?