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Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

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Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#21

Post by korse »

thoughtFrame wrote: post #5

I've only learned of the Good Ol' Days of the 90s from second hand sources, and I was in middle school throughout the aughts, so for me these periods are just a mirage of a better time. In high school I pursued reverse engineering and other stuff, so I could blissfully ignore the newer direction the industry was taking all the way until 2019. But now I'm close to graduating university. Is there any kind of job where…

Heavy industry. Manufacturing, mining etc. This stuff isn't always in the flashiest locations and wfh is bad form in my experience, but it is certainly critical. There are all sorts of custom systems keeping track of (and tying together) high value physical processes.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#22

Post by divbzero »

12 years ago, even without AWS, you could get a Linode, host an app on its naked IP, and not made to feel too much like you weren't "serious" about hosting your app. These days you almost always need to know a fair bit of Docker and Docker Compose, a lot of people want to Kubernetes, ELBs got replaced by ALBs + NLBs which you gotta manage in VPCs which you gotta manage through Security Groups and your traffic gets routed through CDNs. Logs are structured and passed to a SaaS which will have a custom search syntax that takes tens of seconds to search them poorly, and they'll get lost in the noise of all those components. You'll spend a non-trivial amount of time devising systems for tracing requests through all these components.

That sounds so spot on.

We do have a choice though. Static HTML, server-side templating, vertical scaling and /var/log still exist and work just fine. We don’t need to adopt the newfangled techniques unless the use case calls for them.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#23

Post by bitwize »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #19
stiglitz wrote: post #10

"12 years ago everyone was wondering how we'd program on multicore CPUs" is either laughable or enlightening to read as an OS developer.

12 years ago it might have been laughable. But the Core2 Duo was released in 2006, some 7 years before, so the problem was well in hand by then. But go back 20 years, and you predate Linux RCU. The OS Developers weren't laughing at the problem then. Arguably the Linux Real Time patches are solving a similar problem, which could be said to be extracting maximum parallelism out of the code. For Real Time this isn't so…

> But go back 20 years, and you predate Linux RCU. The OS Developers weren't laughing at the problem then.

I believe it was the DEC Ultrix dev team who, reportedly, amused themselves after hours by making transparencies of Linux source code, projecting them on a screen, cracking open a few beers and having a laugh at the idiot mistakes those college kids made -- mistakes, of course, that you can avoid by choosing a real Unix OS.

It took a while for Linux to actually be taken seriously outside of home-lab tinkering.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#26

Post by EamonnMR »

> Logs are structured and passed to a SaaS which will have a custom search syntax that takes tens of seconds to search them poorly, and they'll get lost in the noise of all those components. You'll spend a non-trivial amount of time devising systems for tracing requests through all these components.

I feel this one. At a previous gig we had an entire project to try and pick a logging solution, and none on offer let you do the one fundamental operation that makes using logs bearable; full text search.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#28

Post by forgetfreeman »

One thing the author seems to miss: web-based rich UI was facing serious headwinds because W3C accessibility standards were definitely still a thing and nobody wanted to associate with a project that was getting dragged publicly by ADA activists for giving screen readers the finger.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#30

Post by dtech »

> The story that solidified is: Use Boring Technology. Use [...] Ruby [...]

> I think this narrative, while conventional, is bollocks. [...] Ruby's weird semantics are credited for how one person as able to use it to make a world-changing framework; to call Ruby a "boring" choice now is a testament to how successful the right weird tech can be!

Sorry, but this whole section is bollocks. I've never heard anyone call Ruby boring, and I've had one too many methods monkey-patched in from halfway across the universe to ever call Ruby "boring". Basically no-one seems to use Ruby for new Serious™ Programming™ Projects™ anymore.

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