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Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

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Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#31

Post by baccheion »

wegs wrote: post #19

I predict the following changes: 1) Typed languages are worse, and you want people with high levels of competence. 2) Java actually IS terrible. You win very little by designing for incompetent coworkers. Plan for competence, and hire appropriately. Small elite teams beat large incompetent teams every time. See #1. 3) Thinking through scalability upfront matters in many systems. Not all systems. Many systems. 4) SOLI…

Many would desire elite teams. On the other hand, such capable programmers are not the norm. Most are stuck with what they get and have to make it work.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#32

Post by t-writescode »

wegs wrote: post #19

I predict the following changes: 1) Typed languages are worse, and you want people with high levels of competence. 2) Java actually IS terrible. You win very little by designing for incompetent coworkers. Plan for competence, and hire appropriately. Small elite teams beat large incompetent teams every time. See #1. 3) Thinking through scalability upfront matters in many systems. Not all systems. Many systems. 4) SOLI…

10ish years in, professionally. I agree with the official list provided by the link pretty well.

edited for clarity

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#33

Post by leetrout »

evan_ wrote: post #18
alain_gilbert wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be an "insane weirdo", but at some point I gave up. Now, I just focus on code correctness, merge and fix the code style myself, avoiding a lot of useless back and forth. My hope is that people like to see their name when they "git blame" (what's the PC version of "blame" again?) So they will over time learn to follow the code style in order to keep their name there.

Credit

I like that a lot.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#34

Post by tomnipotent »

virmundi wrote: post #15
cbdumas wrote: post #13

> Designing scalable systems when you don't need to makes you a bad engineer. > In general, RDBMS > NoSql These two bullet points resonate with me so much right now. I'm a consultant and a lot of my client absolutely insist on using DynamoDB for everything . I'm building an internal facing app that will have users numbering in the hundreds, maybe. The hoops we are jumping through to break this app up into "microservi…

Are there other constraints that might make DynamoDB a good fit? For example I made an app at a client. We could use RDS or we could use Dynamo. I went with Dynamo because it could fit our simple model. What’s more, it doesn’t get shut off nightly when the RDS systems do to save money. This means we can work work on it when people have to time shift due to events in the life like having to pick up the kids.

> it doesn’t get shut off nightly when the RDS systems do to save money

If your company needs to shutdown RDS to save a couple of bucks a month, there's a much larger problem at hand than RDS vs Dynamo.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#36

Post by hctaw »

dimtempo84 wrote: post #2

I'm doing my best to not be an "insane weirdo" by focusing on the correctness of code, and to ignore the extra blank lines and spaces, lack of a space in between the "//" and the first word of the comment, and inconsistent camel casing in the work of some of my colleagues.

Use an autoformatter and be done with it.

If your preferred codestyle can't be expressed in a standard formatting tool, change your code style and run the autoformatter once. Have a bot make the commit if you care about your diff histories.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#37

Post by martinald »

virmundi wrote: post #15
cbdumas wrote: post #13

> Designing scalable systems when you don't need to makes you a bad engineer. > In general, RDBMS > NoSql These two bullet points resonate with me so much right now. I'm a consultant and a lot of my client absolutely insist on using DynamoDB for everything . I'm building an internal facing app that will have users numbering in the hundreds, maybe. The hoops we are jumping through to break this app up into "microservi…

Are there other constraints that might make DynamoDB a good fit? For example I made an app at a client. We could use RDS or we could use Dynamo. I went with Dynamo because it could fit our simple model. What’s more, it doesn’t get shut off nightly when the RDS systems do to save money. This means we can work work on it when people have to time shift due to events in the life like having to pick up the kids.

The problem with NoSQL is that your simple model inevitably becomes more complex over time and then it doesn't work anymore.

Over the past decade I've realised using a RDBMS is the right call basically 100% of the time. Now pgsql has jsonb column types that work great, I cannot see why you would ever use a NoSQL DB, unless you are working at such crazy scale postgres wouldn't work. In 99.999% of cases people are not.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#38

Post by cbdumas »

virmundi wrote: post #15
cbdumas wrote: post #13

> Designing scalable systems when you don't need to makes you a bad engineer. > In general, RDBMS > NoSql These two bullet points resonate with me so much right now. I'm a consultant and a lot of my client absolutely insist on using DynamoDB for everything . I'm building an internal facing app that will have users numbering in the hundreds, maybe. The hoops we are jumping through to break this app up into "microservi…

Are there other constraints that might make DynamoDB a good fit? For example I made an app at a client. We could use RDS or we could use Dynamo. I went with Dynamo because it could fit our simple model. What’s more, it doesn’t get shut off nightly when the RDS systems do to save money. This means we can work work on it when people have to time shift due to events in the life like having to pick up the kids.

I can't speak to your specific use case, but I can tell you that a relatively small RDS instance is probably a lot more performant than you think. There is also "Aurora Serverless" now which I've just started to play with but might suit your needs.

As far as what makes Dynamo a good fit, I almost take the other approach and try to ask myself, what makes Postgres a bad fit? Postgres is so flexible and powerful that IMO you need a really good reason to walk away from that as the default.

Re: Software engineering topics I changed my mind on

#39

Post by runawaybottle »

dimtempo84 wrote: post #2

I'm doing my best to not be an "insane weirdo" by focusing on the correctness of code, and to ignore the extra blank lines and spaces, lack of a space in between the "//" and the first word of the comment, and inconsistent camel casing in the work of some of my colleagues.

I find that the people that over stress code style (developer version of the grammar Nazi) end up wasting their social capital and overall energy.

They lose capital going back and forth in these squabbles and lose their ability to look for much bigger danger signs such as over abstractions, under abstractions, and convoluted code.

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