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Never update anything

blog.kronis.dev

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Re: Never update anything

#111

Post by andrei_says_ »

abraxas wrote: post #98

"When your company won't be the first to market, because about 20% of your total development capacity needs to spent on keeping up" In the world of JS and Typescript this ratio looks more like 80%. I swear that node hipsters at my last job spent four out of five of their working days wrangling with dependencies or their transpilers, linters, packagers, bundlers and whatever the hell else needs to happen to actually m…

This is why I can’t use anything too complicated. I’m just not smart enough to wrangle complex configurations and dependencies.

So I keep producing Rails apps that get the job done without the bells and whistles and without much polish.

I wish I could hire a config expert for half an hour and have them create the setup I want. Because I will never get my masters in webpack/rollup/postcss/stimulusjs/mystery sauce working config du jour.

Re: Never update anything

#113

Post by secondaryacct »

abraxas wrote: post #98

"When your company won't be the first to market, because about 20% of your total development capacity needs to spent on keeping up" In the world of JS and Typescript this ratio looks more like 80%. I swear that node hipsters at my last job spent four out of five of their working days wrangling with dependencies or their transpilers, linters, packagers, bundlers and whatever the hell else needs to happen to actually m…

Having always been fullstack even in my current large traditional bank, I see both codebases in Java 6 and maven poms that are a paradise to change (and a java 8 upgrade is often trivial and sufficient to get most of the nice candies you really need), and yarn/npm frontend projects that cant be even rebuilt two weeks later, everyone insanely writing auto updating version descriptor (^2.0.4 with the ^).

I cannot understand what idiot thought it d be fancy cutting everything into mini dependencies that update every day without you knowing made by amateurish hipsters who transitive depend on each other like their life depended on it. Yes you can lock but every build script I ve seen forgot this detail and resolve anew the dependencies !! Why !?!?

Yes it s a pain to move up a version sometimes in Java, but we decide to do it for a reason, spend a few days tops fighting it if we must and it's done. You re right that in JS I cant even teach my more backend colleagues how the fuck it works and how I can navigate it. And I m very against transpilers and linters which I try to avoid for sanity but sometimes you inherit a hero's code and you re like omfg a vue js to typescript to js hacky build chain that worked 2 years ago on bower and now bower is gone and yarn wont build it. And you re 2 weeks well into it before you start building and discussing what you actually wanted to change :D

What kills me the most is when someone in management calls the java backend that is ultra optimized, instant to change, a dream to deploy "legacy" and the yarn soup that is coded by 200 successively burnt out juniors, does 40k binding function calls on a non moving DOM (you know, to "hydrate" it with whatever framework du jour was fancy 5 months ago), and we cant redeploy without a full budget proposal, that people do everything to be assigned out of "modern" grrr

I kid you not we have an entire team in charge of one small frontent management tool for a pretrade backend, they literally spend 99% of their time justifying why they wont change it, and 1% begging me to join for a week to reorder their column or put a new button... and THEY re in charge of it argl, and I cannot for the life of me spend more than 30 minutes teaching them before they snooze "I dont get it, let s pick our battles and change that one thing with you and promised it s the last time" ...

Re: Never update anything

#114

Post by icedchai »

shimonabi wrote: post #39

I upgraded my Ubuntu distribution last week and my old Xerox Phaser laser printer stopped working over the network. Something like this should never happen. I hate spending my weekends troubleshooting the Samba configuration. Maybe I will connect the printer to a Windows VM.

Ubuntu upgrades are often a mess, even with LTS versions. Some issues I've encountered: 1) system lost its default route after an upgrade 2) network interface names changed, all connectivity was lost 3) system became unbootable (UEFI boot order changed.) This was all on a physical machine, and loss of connectivity meant having to to go the console.

Re: Never update anything

#115

Post by pramodbiligiri »

torben-friis wrote: post #108
EastSmith wrote: post #106

I feel the pain, seeing non-trivial updates for Ruby, Elasticsearch and Postgres (thanks AWS) this year. Can not agree with the React part though. They keep so many things backward compatible. React 16 is 3, 4 years old now? I've updated pretty big code base from early 16 to latest 16 version painlessly - like in a day. Used some of the available code-modes for some really old part of the project. It worked flawlessl…

Sort of off topic I guess, but: if I wanted to learn react nowadays (coming from extensive backend experience but not much in the front end) where should I start? From ignorance, it seems like react has changed a fair amount during its lifetime, in terms of good practices, features available, etc. Where can one find resources that are both complete for a begginer and not outdated?

create-react—app is a good way to create the necessary scaffolding.

There’s an O’Reilly book called Learning React (2nd Edition) which is great. It brings you up to speed on the history of the framework as well.

Re: Never update anything

#116

Post by gruez »

habeebtc wrote: post #94

Timely. I was recently force upgraded to Win11. Today in fact. Last week I force-downgraded after I got an exception because it is my busy time of year. That exception was not respected and I realized fighting it weekly would be the same time investment as fixing compatibility issues. "What compatibility issues? Win11 is fine, I have had no problems." My coworkers say. Well on Day 1, 2 pretty important pieces of soft…

Why not just get LTSC? You get zero feature updates (ie. the breaking kind) pushed on you, but you still get security updates for up to 10 years.

Re: Never update anything

#117

Post by jart »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #104
habeebtc wrote: post #94

Timely. I was recently force upgraded to Win11. Today in fact. Last week I force-downgraded after I got an exception because it is my busy time of year. That exception was not respected and I realized fighting it weekly would be the same time investment as fixing compatibility issues. "What compatibility issues? Win11 is fine, I have had no problems." My coworkers say. Well on Day 1, 2 pretty important pieces of soft…

I loved and lived Windows for a decade and felt so cozy and at home in it, but when the first force-upgrade happened, I knew it was time to move along. Just cannot accept things changing without my consent on my workstation.

Mac and Linux do the same thing. I know people who still prefer the OSX 10.3 and the GNOME2 GUIs, or for instance the way nytimes.com looked back in 2010. That's the problem with making GUIs the thing you love. Some goons stop by your home every few years and toss up the furniture. Apple is the gold standard since it pretty much looks the same as it did in the 80's and each major version tunes subtle things. Microsoft makes big changes to look, but at the end of the day its substance is the same. Then there's Linux where each GUI update is a radical break with tradition that continually reinvents its own identity.

Re: Never update anything

#118

Post by noduerme »

abraxas wrote: post #98

"When your company won't be the first to market, because about 20% of your total development capacity needs to spent on keeping up" In the world of JS and Typescript this ratio looks more like 80%. I swear that node hipsters at my last job spent four out of five of their working days wrangling with dependencies or their transpilers, linters, packagers, bundlers and whatever the hell else needs to happen to actually m…

I'm still building new frontend UI with Typescript 2.x, Bootstrap 4 alpha, Pixijs 3.x. I don't particularly care about flags in code dependencies, and if they're a problem to upgrade I'll use the old version too. Does it matter? A UI just needs to work, ideally forever, and it's all javascript in the end anyway. It'll work the exact same 10 years from now. Serverside code is a different beast and you can't avoid upgrading Node or PHP, or migrating to MySQL 8. But only very occasionally does this present the opportunity or sufficient reason to upgrade frontend code.

Re: Never update anything

#119

Post by d4mi3n »

secondaryacct wrote: post #113
abraxas wrote: post #98

"When your company won't be the first to market, because about 20% of your total development capacity needs to spent on keeping up" In the world of JS and Typescript this ratio looks more like 80%. I swear that node hipsters at my last job spent four out of five of their working days wrangling with dependencies or their transpilers, linters, packagers, bundlers and whatever the hell else needs to happen to actually m…

Having always been fullstack even in my current large traditional bank, I see both codebases in Java 6 and maven poms that are a paradise to change (and a java 8 upgrade is often trivial and sufficient to get most of the nice candies you really need), and yarn/npm frontend projects that cant be even rebuilt two weeks later, everyone insanely writing auto updating version descriptor (^2.0.4 with the ^). I cannot under…

The small dependency thing is a sad artifact of the days when most JavaScript libraries were built to run on the browser. In that context, prior to the days of mature tools to do things like tree-shaking to remove unused code, the easiest way to make things smaller was to make JS modules as small as possible so code could opt-in to subsets of a library it wanted to use.

Fast forward 5 or 8 years and we have a very fragmented ecosystem of NPM modules—some built to be used on the web, some not—built on a legacy of tiny modules and deep dependency trees.

Add on to all that the pace at which the JS and browser ecosystem moves and it’s not too surprising that things have ended up the way they are.

Teams don’t need to build projects with deep dependency trees, but it’s pretty hard to avoid them with the NPM registry in the shape it’s in.

Re: Never update anything

#120

Post by Icathian »

EastSmith wrote: post #106

I feel the pain, seeing non-trivial updates for Ruby, Elasticsearch and Postgres (thanks AWS) this year. Can not agree with the React part though. They keep so many things backward compatible. React 16 is 3, 4 years old now? I've updated pretty big code base from early 16 to latest 16 version painlessly - like in a day. Used some of the available code-modes for some really old part of the project. It worked flawlessl…

6 years being like "a century in terms of FE" is the core objection being made in both the article and the comments. You're right in every point, but I can't help but feel like you're accepting a state of affairs that should be unacceptable.
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