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Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

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Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#31

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 ro…

I feel fortunate to run one of my current projects in that aforementioned "Linode-esque" fashion.

It is just so, so much simpler to debug and trace what's going on. It can handle a surprising amount of traffic and work before any actual issues come up. Nothing changes from an upstream vendor, at all. It really "just works".

That said, I'm very aware there's a sweet spot and that this doesn't work past a certain point. I just think that point is so far beyond where most people actually get.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#33
post #24

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

I was a freshman CS student in 2010-2011 and we learned multi-threaded programming in our first year.

Sure but you would have learned it in 1995 too.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#35

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…

My experience of programming as a Junior Software Engineer in the '90s was replacing inner loops with inline assembly, avoiding cache misses (keep your code in the L1 cache) and making sure your memory accesses stayed on one page. Nobody seems to care even in the slightest about this stuff anymore, and the abysmal performance of modern software shows it. During the last 30 years, everyone's focus has drifted up the s…

Certain industries still care about this stuff. Some trading firms rely on performant systems which utilize strategies like what you described. Not everything is in hardware and it varies from place to place

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#36

> 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 y…

Cloudwatch tho

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#37
post #11
post #9

> think of how many Americans buy giant cars who don't need giant cars. I hesitate to comment since I’m nitpicking a parenthetical, but this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life? We’re the industry making giant…

> this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life? A giant car is probably the most harmful-to-others luxury indulgence you could pick (and a significant factor in why people can't afford housing). I'm all for having…

> A giant car is probably the most harmful-to-others luxury indulgence you could pick

Some people are simply refusing to harm themselves when they choose a large vehicle.

Getting in and out of a "regular" sized car routinely injures me. The injuries are painful, immobilize me for weeks at a time, and occur several times per year.

I also know several people for whom being in a compact car causes anxiety or panic.

Do cases like this enter into your calculus, or do you just assume everybody you see in a large vehicle doesn't much care for the rest of humanity?

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#38

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 ro…

But you literally don't have to do any such thing though.

A simple make file and maybe a load balancer can easily let you launch large web applications used by millions of users.

I do not understand where people are getting stuck here that they need all of this complexity.

How many users do these apps have?

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#39
post #30

> 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 R…

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/

This guy called it boring when justifying its use for discourse back in 2013.

> Ruby isn't cool any more. Yeah, you heard me. It's not cool to write Ruby code any more. All the cool people moved on to slinging Scala and Node.js years ago. Our project isn't cool, it's just a bunch of boring old Ruby code.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#40
post #9

> think of how many Americans buy giant cars who don't need giant cars. I hesitate to comment since I’m nitpicking a parenthetical, but this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life? We’re the industry making giant…

As an owner of a normal sized car, oversized cars are unnecessarily aggressive towards other people. Both because of the drivers attitude and the design. Some examples: Lights always blind me, they block almost all vision, and have very poor vision themselves.

and chrush any pedestrians they hit.
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