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Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

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Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#181

Post by nkingsy »

Oras wrote: post #159
swat535 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances, docker containers and jenkins. The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that wastes it. This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from my life (except H…

Hear hear! I wish one day the dev community will understand that its never about the tools and more about the delivery. The customer does not give a monkey if the backend is node, go or PHP. You do not impress anyone by using React, redux, amber, angular ... etc. All people care about is a solution to a problem they have. However, from my experience, this is not a popular opinion among developers.

Popular open source tools are a poor substitute for standards, but they are better than nothing.

Standards matter if you want to show your code to someone else

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#182

Post by paledot »

Oras wrote: post #159
swat535 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances, docker containers and jenkins. The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that wastes it. This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from my life (except H…

Hear hear! I wish one day the dev community will understand that its never about the tools and more about the delivery. The customer does not give a monkey if the backend is node, go or PHP. You do not impress anyone by using React, redux, amber, angular ... etc. All people care about is a solution to a problem they have. However, from my experience, this is not a popular opinion among developers.

Which is why I open my conversational interviews with, "There's an emergency, sales promised a customer a to-do list app yesterday. It's getting shipped out and forgotten, you're doing it on your own, only thing that matters is it's done fast. What do you use?". And then of course I spring the, "Okay, now it's becoming a flagship product. How do you onboard co-workers? How do you pivot to ongoing maintenance? What problems do you anticipate scaling it out?". But it's always important to have a tool in your toolbox to hack something together in an afternoon, even if it's just to prove a point.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#183

Post by dontbeabill »

swat535 wrote: post #137
Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances, docker containers and jenkins. The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that wastes it. This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from my life (except H…

it is amazing to me that after 20 years of doing this, and endless river of new “tools” to help, it has become a labyrinth of config files, aws, IAM, deploy complexity and unenjoyable “stuff”.

i feel like i used to “build things” to solve problems. now it’s just unwind a bunch of complexity for the sake of complexity

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#184

Post by nicbou »

agumonkey wrote: post #68
nicbou wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned my trade by playing. I suspect that many other people on HN also did. Now I do something very different, and that also came from playing, as did many of the skills that made it possible. I still write code, but it's entirely for fun. It's a completely different experience from closing tickets in an office. I do many other things that aren't very cost-effective, just because they're fun. They might not pay t…

I wonder how much is made by very simple emotions: - playing - competition - noble obligations (helping someone else) I keep looking at adult life in dismay because what people consider work would barely amount to 20 minutes of soccer when we were kids. We used to run wild for hours, hurt ourselves, attempt everything that could work and we kept asking for more. Can we plug that back into daily adult jobs ?

I really wish there was a PE class for adult, where you stretch, run around the track, then play some random sport for about an hour. One day it's cops and robbers, another it's grass hockey, and nobody knows in advance.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#185

Post by bredren »

Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

I had the opposite happen. I had been building servers for my (largely Django-based) projects using long txt files from old digital ocean tutorials I had customized.[1]

I fought docker and all of that but had some time last year between gigs and spent a few weeks examining the state of things and experimenting. The most influential of works were recent guides by Michael Herman. [2]

In the process I learned to set up not fully reproducible server setups but branch and commit message-specific CI/CD workflows using Github Actions.

It turns out it is like most things, hard and complicated until you know and have living samples and then it seems relatively straightforward and efficient.

GA is still fairly young and there is still opportunity to create and share flourishes of art in devops there.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

[2] https://testdriven.io/blog/deploying-django-to-digitalocean-...

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#186

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

> Big mistake. I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with tools, debugging build processes that break all the time, make sense of docker's tagging system and so on. I don't mind programming all day, because I love programming, but I do mind working all day.

Yeah, I've basically moved on from anything that isn't Caprover + Portainer. Fuck the rest.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#187

Post by hpcjoe »

swat535 wrote: post #137
Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances, docker containers and jenkins. The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that wastes it. This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from my life (except H…

This 1000x.

Sadly the extended out of state family seems to like FB, and I try to follow science/math twitter.

As you get older, something in you clicks, that you realize that time spent being angry, or combative, reduces the time you have for enjoying things (family, life, etc.).

Your time on earth is a zero sum game. Maximize its utility, maximize your enjoyment, minimize your negativity (e.g. outrage of the day on social media). Your life will be better.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#188

Post by jeremyjh »

lumost wrote: post #144
goodpoint wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with tools, debugging build processes that break all the time, make sense of docker's tagging system Now that CV-driven development is the standard, we are forced to learn new bloated "devops" tools and services every year. This type of knowledge expires very quickly. Also these tools and services do not develop communities: business users drop last-year tools like hot…

Sometimes I wonder if modern corporate culture has adopted soviet style newspeak. Why are we immigrating to the new thing? For the same reasons as we migrated to the old thing. Why is the new thing better? Because it’s just so much better.

Because there are people for whom "playing" means implementing new devops tools, cluster managers, application servers, etc. In production.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#189

Post by void_mint »

Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

For me, true programming joy comes from not having to look at docs. To be able to just write code for long periods of time, without running into something weird happening with a library or tool is the "zen" feeling that I hear lots of others talk about.

At work, and in this domain:

> I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automatically deploy containers and so on.

It's all docs. It's all "This thing was supposed to happen but ____ didn't do what I expected". Fighting with tools and configuration and triggers and stuff like that is the opposite of zen.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#190

Post by moksly »

Oras wrote: post #159
swat535 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances, docker containers and jenkins. The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that wastes it. This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from my life (except H…

Hear hear! I wish one day the dev community will understand that its never about the tools and more about the delivery. The customer does not give a monkey if the backend is node, go or PHP. You do not impress anyone by using React, redux, amber, angular ... etc. All people care about is a solution to a problem they have. However, from my experience, this is not a popular opinion among developers.

Isn’t the development community sort of there? I mean, most things are still run on PHP, and honestly, I recently saw an open source “forms for the public sector” thing build in Drupal, and now I’m wondering if we’ll ever need another custom programmed form for our web facing applications.

Yet if I go back to my non-management dev friends and talk about this, they are all like “eeeew, what about X and Y” and I’m just like, but neither the citizens or my IT operations staff gives two shits about any of that.

I’m not going to say what is right technically, because I’m not qualified to do that, but I do know what will happen as it’s my decision, and we’ll be slowly moving all our customs forms to a PHP CMS system and we’re just going to shoot the docket container it comes in directly out into our internal Azure cloud with public access through our national identity system (NemID). My developers aren’t going to be out of work either, but instead of making the same form with small differences 9000 times, they will be building Drupal modules with actual challenges.

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