Just spin up a Rails app, pop on a Postgres DB, tailwind CSS, job done.
(Only half joking.)
Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
211–220 of 430 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#212The ecosystem is flooded with over-engineered bespoke solutions, and is sorely lacking in standardized approaches and best practices. It's a core reason why software development cannot reasonably be called engineering, as engineering principles are either never applied or discarded on a whim.
It won't change until we can form a guild (professional association) and turn it into a bonafide profession. Right now, code that one developer creates may be unrecognizable by another developer, even though both are working in the same domain. It would be a disaster if one lawyer could not follow a brief written by another or a doctor could not decipher which techniques were used by another to perform a particular surgical procedure.
"Just because you can drive a car with your feet if you wanted to, doesn't make it a good fucking idea!" --Chris Rock.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#213I'm over here jobbing from home on my couch (#winning) thinking about how screwed it feels that my task for the past couple days has been to send transaction details to a "webhook" so that a template email can be sent to the customer for 3rd party compliance purposes.
Why the heck can't we trigger an email from our internals? Oh, we don't even host our own email... because we're using a different company to host ALL our emails, documents, filestorage, etc...
i'm_in_danger.gif
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#214I think there's a huge amount of 'boring' software development going on that doesn't touch any of kind of stuff. Java and C++ still run a lot of things.
I'm still suspicious of Guava, let alone Rust.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#215Just say no. I know this isn't easy. I'm the tech lead at my company and I've continuously steered us away from stuff because I couldn't understand why we needed to do things differently and no one else could come up with a reasonable argument for why anything of the things that we had that worked needed changing. I have dabbled with all the things but not found a compelling reason to change anything. Sometimes people go off on a tangent and sometimes they discover something useful but I'm in no rush to get there. What we have is fine and we have stuff to do.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you're using python for the web you're already part of the complexity problem, atleast from the perspective of someone deploying php 15 years ago. The problem with deploying PHP is that it immediately gives you something for very little effort, but the effort scales incredibly disproportionately once you outgrow your need for the bare functioning minimum. I personally prefer the "modern" approach of dropping a s…
Oh I agree, I still get chills when I think about troubleshooting PHP. I was really just making the point that the effort to deploy python as a webapp these days would have been considered overly complex to the average developer 15 years ago. Just how some of the current stuff seems to the OP, so maybe not all seemingly complex stuff is bad.
The debugging story around PHP is better than other major scripting runtimes like Node. With PHP and kcachegrind you can really understand where you're spending CPU easily. The tools for Node work but just aren't there yet. Another nice combo is Java + Mission Control.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#217Excellent question. Esp. the final bit where you ask about 'the business value'. It is actually closer to just 'value' - as experienced by the users.
If you are in a position where you see piling up complexity does not bring in more satisfied users and more money that is a great time to set up a simpler competitor that will do things on the cheap in a less complex way.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it definitely has got worse, I've been doing this 15 years, the sweet spot was the Rails revolution. Before that a lot of frameworks were a bit too much magic, and not enough understanding of how browsers, http and html worked. Simple MVC stacks went to all languages, jQuery front-ends doing enough but not a lot. JavaScript enhanced easy to reason about server-side stacks. You used to spend a couple of days a yea…
People still do deploy production ready systems using RoR, Django/Python or whatever "sweet spot" framework you want to mention. Some run quite successful businesses. You can't generalise from your experience over the last few months. > Programming used to be about writing code to solve business problems. The shift to DevOps has been a massive productivity drain and most stacks are now incredibly brittle. Some busine…
I was looking for a new job recently. Almost every single job advert listed "microservices".
So yes, it is affecting our entire industry. Every aspect of it.
There are very small number of organisations that actually have any sort of need of a microservice architecture.
Worse still, actually talk to these orgs, they'll say they actually have a "hybrid" microservice architecture. Which is basically the worst of both worlds, all the pains of managing microservices, without any of the benefits you get in a normally built application (derisively called 'monolith' with all the negative connotations that word has). Half your calls disappear into the black hole of HTTP calls. No pressing F12 on a method call and going straight to the code. No easy stepping through code in the debugger. No simple download the code and just press play and it all works.
I like solving business domain problems. Not tooling problems. Tooling problems are incredibly boring and frustrating to me. To a certain type of programmer, rather than actually doing their actual job, they absolutely love introducing tooling problems as busy work. Because the actual business domain problems don't interest them. Then switch role as they've got the new hotness on their CV before they have to maintain the craziness they've introduced to the code stack.
Case in point on a project I helped get over the line recently. I joined 1.5 years already done on the project, development has slowed to a crawl. Lead architect designed a system of DDD, event-sourcing, message queues, microservices. Just to add a new field I had to edit 10 files. To add a new form I had a PR which edited/added 40 different files. How it actually worked completely flummoxed juniors + mid-level devs, it was beyond them.
All for a 10 page form that would have at most 150,000 uniques in one month per year. Roughly 1 request per second, assuming a ten hour day and 1 request per form page. Child's play.
A standard stack would have easily handled that load, probably even on a VM. A dedicated server would never have gone over 10% CPU. It would have been massively easier to develop, and cost 1/10th in dev time.
At one point I had a quick go at re-writing a section without the trendiness. Just to see, as I'd never have got it through the politics involved in that PR. I switched the event-sourcing, microservices, 5-tier craziness for a simple, easy to understand, service. Took me 1/2 a day, tests passed, reduced DB calls. Over a thousand lines removed, 100 added. Absolute nuts.
Millions wasted on trendy architecture. Of course the architect left a year into the project for greener pastures.
Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
People still do deploy production ready systems using RoR, Django/Python or whatever "sweet spot" framework you want to mention. Some run quite successful businesses. You can't generalise from your experience over the last few months. > Programming used to be about writing code to solve business problems. The shift to DevOps has been a massive productivity drain and most stacks are now incredibly brittle. Some busine…
God I am sick of these apologetics every time someone expresses skepticism. > Get it wrong another way and you end up overwhelmed by traffic, unable to scale in response and forever fighting fires. To nitpick this specifically, over my 12-year career toiling over this stuff there has never been a scenario where this has required a radical rework to solve. Boring-ass B2B shit rarely requires that level of engineering…
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Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
#220Sounds like you're getting caught up in the hype. You don't have to use any of those tools or technologies to do your job, and indeed the vast majority of people working in software don't.
The only people who are screwed are the people who follow hype. The rest of us are just fine.