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Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

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Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#61

Post by dijit »

Guthur wrote: post #43

I think IRC was a big part of community knowledge and also such a hot spot for weird inspiration. I can attribute my picking up of Common Lisp and ultimately getting a job in Australia from the UK to an off the cuff comment by someone in IRC.

I learned linux only because people on IRC were willing to handhold me through it.

Microsoft had a very strong hold on education during that period.

I didn't learn anything outside of the Microsoft Ecosystem: Excel and Word, yes, but also Access and VB.NET when I was trying to get into programming.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#62

Post by spacechild1 »

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.

Yeah, s/everyone/webdevs.

Typical audio software, for example, has been multithreaded since the 90s (simply because the audio callback and the GUI must run in different threads). And in the mid 2000s these threads started to run on different CPUs.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#63

Post by dijit »

jhawleypeters wrote: post #37
lmm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> 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.

Seek medical assistance, immediately. This is not a joke, I am not intending to offend you- you genuinely should seek medical assistance as in: right now.

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

Now I will intend to offend: Yes, lets make the problem worse! Humans without cars should feel even more anxiety and panic! Especially tiny ones which you can't even see.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#64

Post by Guthur »

59nadir wrote: post #59
Guthur wrote: post #43

I think IRC was a big part of community knowledge and also such a hot spot for weird inspiration. I can attribute my picking up of Common Lisp and ultimately getting a job in Australia from the UK to an off the cuff comment by someone in IRC.

I started learning programming (C++) when I was 12-13 (2000-2001) because a guy on QuakeNet told me I should learn how to code if I want to learn about hacking. All these years later I'm very well paid to create distributed systems in technologies I could've never imagined back then. The funny thing is that I want to stop doing that and have other problems instead, because I'm just tired of everything that has to do…

With games as a service and increasing desire to de-risk large projects I'd be a little wary of the grass is greener.

There might be something a kin to old school hacking in the indie domain.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#65

Post by Guthur »

Guthur wrote: post #64
59nadir wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started learning programming (C++) when I was 12-13 (2000-2001) because a guy on QuakeNet told me I should learn how to code if I want to learn about hacking. All these years later I'm very well paid to create distributed systems in technologies I could've never imagined back then. The funny thing is that I want to stop doing that and have other problems instead, because I'm just tired of everything that has to do…

With games as a service and increasing desire to de-risk large projects I'd be a little wary of the grass is greener. There might be something a kin to old school hacking in the indie domain.

If you've got really top notch low level skills then maybe something in HFT financial space.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#66

Post by maccard »

divbzero wrote: post #22

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 disagree. There are so many simpler options available. DO app platform is point and click deploy from GitHub for $5/month.

Knowing docker these days is a huge boon - it immediately removes the "works on my machine" problem, and honestly the amount of docker knowledge required to deploy a basic even crud app is about 10 lines that can be copy and pasted from stack overflow by searching for "Dockerfile for X"

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#67

Post by notmypenguin »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #38
divbzero wrote: post #22

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?

Not only that, half this supposedly necessary tech actually slows you down: containers and kubernetes, websockets galore, clients like giant barnacles on your server, then we get these best practices that weren’t thought out well: sessions, etc… mostly it’s the cargo cult implementation knee jerk response “gotta have it” like some frontend maniac from 2010 adding jquery to everything, when what is needed is to keep the hood open and keep people talking about the engine parts instead of calling it done and schlepping some guys tractor drag race motor around town delivering pizzas

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#68

Post by 59nadir »

Guthur wrote: post #64
59nadir wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started learning programming (C++) when I was 12-13 (2000-2001) because a guy on QuakeNet told me I should learn how to code if I want to learn about hacking. All these years later I'm very well paid to create distributed systems in technologies I could've never imagined back then. The funny thing is that I want to stop doing that and have other problems instead, because I'm just tired of everything that has to do…

With games as a service and increasing desire to de-risk large projects I'd be a little wary of the grass is greener. There might be something a kin to old school hacking in the indie domain.

I think the point about grass being greener is a good one in general, but I have to say that I'm wording things specifically to account for this: I want other problems than the ones I have now. I don't like the problems modern distributed systems development present me with anymore. It's boring and I genuinely feel like we keep having issues that shouldn't even be issues because of the technologies we use and the layers/systems that have been added to everything.

I will also say, having worked at game studios before I believe them to have a much better barometer for what is extraneous, so even the live services teams at these places tend to be a lot more sensible than your average web shop. Your mileage may vary, though.

Games as a service and de-risking large projects I'm not sure is that relevant? Someone has to work on the engine, the networking code, and so on, and this work is largely not really going anywhere. There have been approximately zero innovations in the last 20 years that remove the need for being able to write lower-level code and knowing the internals of a game engine, provided you want to make something half-way decent.

Even if game studios somehow manage to not do the work I'm interested in, I might just take an extremely long sabbatical while continuing to make games and work on those things.

There is an alternate future where I also try to create custom solutions as a contractor in performance-critical niches and still work primarily with backend stuff, but I'm not sure what that would mean.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#69

Post by marginalia_nu »

Tade0 wrote: post #55
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works better than ever. If anyone ever asks how my search engine, running on consumer hardware and hosted off domestic broadband, how it survives the hacker news front page time and time again without the load times even deteriorating a bit, while many other websites that are ostensibly static in nature tend to keel over? Then the answer is something like this. * nginx * Java * Macroservice architecture * Vertical sc…

Let's also not forget that browsers generally limit the number of requests they send at a time - IIRC the current limit is 6, so a site may be slow just because it sends many requests. Even (or maybe especially?) popular products like Gmail are guilty of this, sending easily over 200 requests. That's 700ms(!) worth of stalled requests in the best case scenario.

HTTP/2 does mitigate this a bit, I think it's mostly just a limitation in the number of threads. Even with pools or green threads, a CPU can only do so many things in parallel.

Context switching is expensive.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#70

Post by tasuki »

jhawleypeters wrote: post #37
lmm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> 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.

How does it injure you?

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