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Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

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Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#81

Post by daenz »

Accept the churn or be left behind, imo.

The best thing you can do to insulate yourself from the pain described in the post (trying to remember how code worked, etc) is to brain dump important things you learn along the way. I've recently begun keeping a TiddlyWiki[0] for every major project I undertake. In it, I keep unexpected things I learned, cheat sheet items, command-line snippets, and longer form entries about structure.

The best part is it was all written by me, so the communication barrier is as low as it can possibly be. Reading one of these TWs allows me to pick up a project again extremely quickly. It's also useful on large projects where different areas are like their own projects unto themselves.

Tools, not closing yourself off, help you overcome your limitations.

0. https://tiddlywiki.com/

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#82

Post by snazz »

1-6 wrote: post #18

I frequently bite into olives only to find pits that did not get machined out.

Unless they’re stuffed olives, I’d recommend just buying them with pits in. There’s quite a lot more variety that way at my local grocery store.

(I know you didn’t mean that literally)

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#83

Post by [deleted] »

rxhernandez wrote: post #63
umvi wrote: post #17

The piece reads like a Unix pastor's pulpit preaching "Great nutritious technologies to use: Make, Emacs, Lisp, CLI" "Bad unwholesome technologies to use: JavaScript, Ruby, IDEs, Graphical User Interfaces" I personally hate Make, it's burned me too many times. Now I use CMake, and I haven't been burned in years. And is it candy or an olive that I like VSCode and not Emacs (not that I've ever tried Emacs, I just don't…

I mean I haven't been a professional for multiple decades but I've written professionally in a very wide range of fields in C, Matlab, Java, Python, Verilog, Assembly, Fortran, and Javascript, and, there is no language that I've seen that has more hair pulling, braindead I just learned to program yesterday type programming nearly as much as I've seen in Javascript. (I've worked intimately with decades old scientific…

[deleted]

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#84

Post by cryptozeus »

tracer4201 wrote: post #65
cryptozeus wrote: post #39

“Examples: Clojure, Common Lisp, HTML, Make Counter-examples: JavaScript, Ruby, React-Preact-Vue-Angular-“ OP does not give any reason as to why these are churn and why stop them ? This makes no sense...basically to op’s point we should just never adopt new technology because it’s just a new shiny thing. This makes no sense at all.

He didn’t elaborate but I agree with him. I’ve seen too many examples of junior devs having to work on some small feature or enhancement, and their idea becomes rewriting the entire code base in whatever new framework of the month happens to be for the time. Yes there are plenty of reasons to adopt new technology, but you have to balance the pros and cons with keeping your business running and most importantly not di…

Agree with everything you said...but remember all the issues you listed are not new to junior dev and also not new particular technology. Same debugging issues were being worked on in c and c++. Your observation is correct but applies to not only to all technology but life in general.

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#85

Post by snazz »

oreglio wrote: post #53
Ididntdothis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. But how do you balance this with the need for looking good on the job market? If you want to stay employable you are almost forced to participate in this craziness.

+1 where I live the jobs with the highest pay grade are for some fancy frameworks. If I've been doing PHP for 5 years on an 10yo framework in a company that didn't feel the need to upgrade to anything. The day I want to find an other job I'm going to be confronted with opportunities that required mastering the latest technologies and I won't find something within my pay range because of this. That is the reality wher…

Aren’t personal projects how most people learn new technologies?

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#86

Post by tomgp »

rxhernandez wrote: post #63
umvi wrote: post #17

The piece reads like a Unix pastor's pulpit preaching "Great nutritious technologies to use: Make, Emacs, Lisp, CLI" "Bad unwholesome technologies to use: JavaScript, Ruby, IDEs, Graphical User Interfaces" I personally hate Make, it's burned me too many times. Now I use CMake, and I haven't been burned in years. And is it candy or an olive that I like VSCode and not Emacs (not that I've ever tried Emacs, I just don't…

I mean I haven't been a professional for multiple decades but I've written professionally in a very wide range of fields in C, Matlab, Java, Python, Verilog, Assembly, Fortran, and Javascript, and, there is no language that I've seen that has more hair pulling, braindead I just learned to program yesterday type programming nearly as much as I've seen in Javascript. (I've worked intimately with decades old scientific…

I have a similar set of experiences but have a feeling that it's at least partly down to the sheer number of people writing Javascript and the very public nature of much of that code that so much of it is a mess. I don't think there's anything inherent in JS that make is produce messy code other than the fact that it's easy for amateurs to get results (thanks to the fact it runs in a browser and there's lots of easily available code samples).

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#87

Post by misterman0 »

apacheCamel wrote: post #80
misterman0 wrote: post #76

>> The Churn is losing a day debugging because a transitive dependency changed a function signature. The Churn is spending a week just to get a project you wrote a year ago to even run. The Churn is rewriting your front-end because a shiny new thing came around. If you think the churn is that then you're lucky. To me, the churn is working for the man. Everything I ever do is for the man. If I could ever reach a point…

I think this is a good place to point out that the "churn" could be a variety of things and really depends on the person "churning". The advice is still sound though, make steps in your life to not deal with the churn. The first step is identifying it, maybe next is how to overcome it. Not always an easy thing to do but I do believe everyone has that one thing holding them back.

The words churn and churning have now lost all of their meaning due to the fact they've been used too much man, you‘ve overused them, c'mon!

But I do think pessimism is the correct state of mind, given how far the tentacles of the man have reached and how little we do to resist his influence.

Who or what is the man? Only a Morpheus can tell you such a thing. I'm not him.

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#88

Post by conception »

misterman0 wrote: post #76

>> The Churn is losing a day debugging because a transitive dependency changed a function signature. The Churn is spending a week just to get a project you wrote a year ago to even run. The Churn is rewriting your front-end because a shiny new thing came around. If you think the churn is that then you're lucky. To me, the churn is working for the man. Everything I ever do is for the man. If I could ever reach a point…

There are many many organizations and Institutes that aren't the man. You don't have to work for a soulless corporation. You can do work that helps the greater good of humanity.

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#89

Post by kabdib »

snazz wrote: post #78
kabdib wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common make fail #1 The project you landed on has been using some souped-up supermake with a ton of features (which were used with wild abandon) and some subtly different semantics for (say) macro expansion and variable assignment (and these are really difficult to determine the dependency scope of). The build system has grown to a recursively gnarly Turing-complete mess. So when you go to update the tooling, you fin…

It feels like most every build system is either super over engineered or just arcane. I like that Go keeps its build system integrated with the language and that its build system is overall pretty simple and easy to grok.

Go's build system is pragmatic and simple and hasn't let me down yet, but I'm still working on projects at fairly small scale, and the Go build system doesn't do much for other languages, so I didn't mention it.

I think that we're going to see more languages with built-in build systems from early-on in the language's development, but that is a doubled-edged sword (works great for your version of WHIZBOL, doesn't work great if you need to interop with other things).

Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn

#90

Post by Crinus »

kabdib wrote: post #75
Crinus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may hate Make and it is certainly far from ideal (tab-based syntax was a mistake) but the thing is, Make has very simple rules that haven't changed for decades and Makefiles generally keep working (and when they break it isn't the fault of Make itself but of something else that isn't as stable/backwards compatible as Make).

Common make fail #1 The project you landed on has been using some souped-up supermake with a ton of features (which were used with wild abandon) and some subtly different semantics for (say) macro expansion and variable assignment (and these are really difficult to determine the dependency scope of). The build system has grown to a recursively gnarly Turing-complete mess. So when you go to update the tooling, you fin…

Sorry i do not understand, is this post a joke? I mean it literally because of the "never happened to me", then the multimillion line makefile doesn't sound real but then you do write something that sounds like someone who has issues with makefiles could say (build order, though common that isn't make's fault - at least as much as isn't a programming language's fault that a program has bugs). So i'm not sure how to take this comment.
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