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Is the madness ever going to end?

unixsheikh.com

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#451

Post by masklinn »

rahimiali wrote: post #356
aemreunal wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions All engineering (including "real" ones like civil or mechanical) is about fitting your requirements within budgets. When one's building a skyscraper, you try to build it in a way that minimizes the cost while satisfying all requirements (it shouldn't fall down given such and such conditions, etc.) Engineering is largely the art of solving problems that…

Ok. What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world? I’d like to use the products from that discipline.

> What is the art of building things that are good, but violate some constraints of the real world?

“The romans were so much better at building stuff”.

You could make buildings matching those, they’d be massively over-engineered and overpriced compared to the modern equivalent, and significantly more limited in suitable locations.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#452

Post by danjac »

whack wrote: post #350
phailhaus wrote: post #85

I feel comfortable with asserting that the author has never worked on a complex web application. This web-dev hate borders on pathological: this is a guy that seems to specialize in Unix/Linux tooling, doesn't have a single tutorial on web app development [1], and yet has an intense hatred towards a space that he barely understands. These types of arguments are incredibly embarrassing to read, not only because they b…

I seem to notice this particularly often with a subset of developers. People who have a very strong "who moved my cheese" mindset. They are used to doing things a certain way. An approach that is simple to understand, but takes a very long time to get anything done. Ie, writing vanilla HTML without any frameworks. Besides, they aren't the ones paying for a team of developers, so they don't really see a downside in sp…

> And these react kiddies are able to put together a webapp that looks so much nicer, has more functionality, and they are able to do it in less time.

If that were true, then great, it would represent a genuine step forward.

Most of the time, you get a webapp that looks the same, works the same, but takes longer to develop (with a larger team of specialists), fails at basic accessibility, fails at SEO, is more brittle, buggy and harder to maintain.

And not to generalize but those React "kiddies" are very much everything-looks-like-a-nail guys. Because they lack breadth of experience and training they'll shove that one tool into every project, even where it makes no sense.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#454

Post by masklinn »

dachryn wrote: post #424
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its best to understand early that an Engineer deals in two commodities: money and time. Their job is not to create ivory-tower ideal solutions. The whole problem, the reason Engineers exists, is to manage technology such that the constraints of money and time can be met.

yeah but the problem is: which budget are you optimizing? That of the company of course. You offload a lot of bullcrap onto the end user. Like the author said, wasting electricity and battery life and thousands of devices just because you cant be bothered to generate html on the server to serve simple text is a common thing for news sites. This is wasting the time as well of the end user, because its slower to load,…

> yeah but the problem is: which budget are you optimizing? That of the company of course.

The budget of the company is predicated upon what the user will be willing to pay for the service.

You’re wasting electricity and battery life of thousands of devices of users who don’t care or want to “vote with their feet”.

Now obviously users are also constrained by what is made available to them, but time and again the shiny and early to market wins out even if it’s a literal trash fire…

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#455

Post by jacobmischka »

Aozora7 wrote: post #443
tryauuum wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me how in one online multiplayer game developers decided to offload the decision of "who's the winner of the match" to client machines. Because there were some problems on server side and they couldn't do it reliably there. Developers said this voting system worked surprisingly well. Theoretically if there were >50 percent of malicious game clients they could all vote for a wrong player but this was hard to a…

You don't have to hunt for rare examples like this, most multiplayer FPS games use client-side hit detection nowadays.

Well that's mainly for latency I think, not just a complicated computing problem.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#456

Post by mschuster91 »

tlackemann wrote: post #3

This is why I get paid top dollar as a consultant ;) When a company's top engineers decide to rewrite their stack in JavaScript, I get to swoop in, take $10k and tell them their old PHP monolith was just fine. Long live idiots, for I'll always get paid

With a full-on rewrite, it's mostly because said top engineers have realized that their application has grown from tiny humble beginning to a behemoth with stuff bolted on everywhere, remnants of no-longer-used components never been removed and the likes, while their superiors won't ever grant budget for actual software maintenance (e.g. remove old cruft, update that Symfony release or in some extreme case, actually use a framework instead of hand-written router and ORM code) but they would be willing to spend money on a complete rewrite.

What these "top engineers" need is a decent CTO, not people like you who come in and tell them to continue working on a tech stack that they have despised to work with for many months now.

Incompetent upper management will only lead to resignations out of frustration, not to progress.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#457

Post by spuz »

Subsentient wrote: post #271
mbrodersen wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument seems to be that bad developers write bad software? Isn’t that true no matter the platform? I have written equally successful software in both Electron and Qt. In my experience, a competent developer can write great software given almost any platform.

While that may be partly true, Electron inherently attracts low-skilled, incompetent programmers due to its 'easiness', while in reality JS isn't that much easier than, say, Python. Not only do you have to deal with dumber programmers writing the code, but what people forget is that CPU and RAM usage isn't just some metric you see in htop or Task Manager. Electron apps are much slower than native apps at doing almost…

> If you write any application in "native" widgets for the host OS, shame on you. That is definitely the wrong way to do things in almost every case nowadays

Could you elaborate on that? Isn't using the native GUI API of the OS a relatively sensible default, especially if you aren't targeting multiple OSes? If you definitely want cross-platform support, I can see the argument for choosing one of the cross-platform frameworks but I still don't think that means using the native GUI API is such a bad choice.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#458

Post by pjmlp »

mschuster91 wrote: post #448
pjmlp wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the feeling, specially bad now with the headless CMS fashion.

Reducing your website to something that can essentially be served straight out of s3 buckets + lambda functions for the few interactive elements your site has (e.g. newsletter subscription, contact form) will reduce your hosting bill and attack surface, but increase operational complexity. The key thing behind the "headless CMS" fashion is that most people severely overestimate the amount of cost reduction and undere…

I guess DevOps also need jobs, when I compare team sizes between both approaches.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#459

Post by mschuster91 »

pjmlp wrote: post #458
mschuster91 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing your website to something that can essentially be served straight out of s3 buckets + lambda functions for the few interactive elements your site has (e.g. newsletter subscription, contact form) will reduce your hosting bill and attack surface, but increase operational complexity. The key thing behind the "headless CMS" fashion is that most people severely overestimate the amount of cost reduction and undere…

I guess DevOps also need jobs, when I compare team sizes between both approaches.

As if "devops" were a job... at most companies the sad reality is that the ops team gets fired and the developers who often enough don't even have more understanding of a Linux shell than ls/cd/cat/rm get told "you're also doing ops now, have fun!".

Inevitably, issues will plop up - hacks, data loss, site going down over the weekend because there's no 24/7 on-call any more - and then management comes down to the devs and whines "what's the cause of problem X"... and fires the rest when they say "we're developers, not SREs and server administrators".

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