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Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

roguelazer.com

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Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#571

Post by erikbye »

dynamite-ready wrote: post #153
mvanga wrote: post #133

This is one weird comment section. There are people attacking the author for a statement made about CoreOS, and for some hate towards Kubernetes. The key point of the article is not really being addressed here: vested interests from large companies are able to introduce huge complexity into simple, well-designed projects. While the complexity may be good for some end that said vested interest has in mind, they are al…

Agreed. I saw it as a general lament against over-engineering. I don't think the point got lost in the super specific example... You could just as easily level similar rants against the likes of React and it's wider ecosystem, Tensorflow, Typescript (many will disagree), Docker... I'm sure others have their own bugbears. Much of this is subjective, of course. But to me, it feels like software development is trending…

> I suppose in exchange, you're getting a guarantee of maintenance.

Hah, with Google? Right.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#572

Post by erikbye »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #264
flatline wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is unnecessarily complex about TypeScript? It's JavaScript, with static typing plus type inference, and pretty nice generics. The ecosystem of modern JS surrounding it is horribly complex but TypeScript itself seems like a fairly straightforward programming language.

It hasn't been a big detriment for me as someone learning Typescript on their own, but it is another moving target for looking up "how do I do x..." and finding most of the forum posts are a little outdated and the latest version of Typescript has a different/better way of doing things than just a year or two ago. I find myself scrolling through github issues comparing my tsconfig to figure out why my stack behaves d…

> and finding most of the forum posts are a little outdated

Which is why you use the up-to-date official documentation.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#573

Post by incompatible »

a1369209993 wrote: post #525
incompatible wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking is the answer, if you don't like the where a particular group is going with an open source project. Fork an old version, and perhaps you will find some others who prefer it that way.

Nope! The original group will sue you for trademark infringement, despite that they're the ones peddling a broken knockoff version. (See, eg Python, Firefox, GIMP, etc; I don't pay much attention to webapp-related stuff, so I don't have more proximate examples.)

So just give it a new name.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#574

Post by theshadowknows »

dynamite-ready wrote: post #153
mvanga wrote: post #133

This is one weird comment section. There are people attacking the author for a statement made about CoreOS, and for some hate towards Kubernetes. The key point of the article is not really being addressed here: vested interests from large companies are able to introduce huge complexity into simple, well-designed projects. While the complexity may be good for some end that said vested interest has in mind, they are al…

Agreed. I saw it as a general lament against over-engineering. I don't think the point got lost in the super specific example... You could just as easily level similar rants against the likes of React and it's wider ecosystem, Tensorflow, Typescript (many will disagree), Docker... I'm sure others have their own bugbears. Much of this is subjective, of course. But to me, it feels like software development is trending…

I can’t even begin to clearly express how much I agree with you. I work for a very large company, not a software company but one that produces a lot of internal applications. The infrastructure that we leverage to do even trivial things is mind blowing. Want to send an email to customers? Roll a series of APIs and fuck it let’s do some machine learning bc yolo, integrate all the things and don’t forget to run everything through APIC. It’s insane.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#575

Post by nudpiedo »

I can 100% agree regarding the evolution of etcd as I used several versions of it and the amount of workarounds I had to use on every version went from 0 to "too many moving parts to know whether I will get a call over the weekend".

With gRPC came as well came as well incompatibility of many clients with less popular architectures and as the article describes, being that a super specialization (because that's the only thing that it is), we are losing the qualities that made OSS legendary.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#576

Post by nudpiedo »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #186
dynamite-ready wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I saw it as a general lament against over-engineering. I don't think the point got lost in the super specific example... You could just as easily level similar rants against the likes of React and it's wider ecosystem, Tensorflow, Typescript (many will disagree), Docker... I'm sure others have their own bugbears. Much of this is subjective, of course. But to me, it feels like software development is trending…

TypeScript is a funny one. I love the language, but at the same time, I totally agree with the premise that it is unnecessary complexity! And yet I swear by it. I can't explain why there's not more cognitive dissonance there. JavaScript taught me to love async, then functional programming, and TypeScript taught to me to love static types. I'm now desperately wishing for a world of OCaml/Haskell, but where are you goi…

> I'm now desperately wishing for a world of OCaml/Haskell, but where are you going to find teammates using those?

Having walked that way I can recommend you to look at F#, and if you aren't a solo developer (or you want to get real regarding jobs and colleagues) make sure you do not have allergy to C# interop.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#577

Post by mnming »

It's almost that every month there is an article like this popping up in HN. The main ideas are all similar: "I don't like complexity, simplicity is king. React, K8S, SAP and bluh bluh are bad. " Maybe I just don't really fit in here. I almost always feel the opposite.

I don't find those new, so called "complex", software difficult. I can pretty easily see why that we need those new features and what problem are they trying to solve. I'm really grateful there are ppl out there solving my problem one-by-one for free. I feel those new softwares enable me to do much more and better than I could do 7~8 years ago.

I feel sorry for the fellows who just can't grasp new technology quickly but this world is cruel.

It's only hard if you can't get it.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#578

Post by lmilcin »

pas wrote: post #560
lmilcin wrote: post #551

Regarding some hate against Kubernetes. The problem is not with the Kubernetes but with management/architecture teams of companies that decide to use k8s for projects that have no real scaling requirements or when overhead of just having a constant fleet of nodes would be less than overhead of maintaining working k8s deployment. Kubernetes is a hugely complex piece of software that is handling hugely complex cases th…

k8s is great even if your requirements are almost static. because it standardizes so many small but important details

It is. I even mentioned it is nice to have engineers be able to move through the company and be familiar with the tools (this is also called standardization).

But if you have only simple applications you will be surprised how complex it is sometimes to debug k8s problems compared to what you would expect from a simple application.

If some of your applications already have very complex deployment needs then you are replacing one complex homemade process for another complex GP solution.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#579

Post by solidasparagus »

sriku wrote: post #553
mekoka wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should also consider that the contrarian nature of HN would set it up to exactly the opposite reaction had the post expressed the reverse of its current positions. The big irony is that it's not inconceivable that it would involve some of the same actors voicing different opinions. > "the incentives of modern software engineering value complexity to artificially strengthen a software engineering job economy" Not…

> " that somehow found their ways in software engineering, out of possibly good intentions" It seems that systems and principles invented for some specific situations get rapidly entrenched as "best practice" due to the wild success of their root corporations. That's twisted much like fashion - "that dress looks great on that model, maybe if I wear that dress, I would look good too".

There's some truth in that, but there's more to it. Successful tech companies build good tech that is often worth adopting:

- the companies' successes are often predicated on strong ability to develop technologies

- good (well-maintained) technology requires resources and the successful tech companies have those resources.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#580

Post by Macha »

zelly wrote: post #508
icedchai wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost nobody does Javascript without a build step these days, unfortunately. I miss those simpler days.

If you don't need IE support and only care about modern browsers...

And also don't use modern frameworks like React or Vue, or don't mind sticking all your templates in strings, or in your index.html, and shipping 100kb of template compiler to to user, or write render functions directly ala mithril.
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