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Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

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Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#91

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…

Question: how do you reliably deploy? And if it's just scp-ing tarballs, how do you handle dependencies? Do you run & upgrade any third-party processes that rely on having their filesystem or deps? Struggling with this because even in a small app in a Linode box, I don't mind just cp-ing my bins but there's always other things/versions they need. Thinking of bringing in Ansible to help me out here. Deploying feels ea…

capistrano makes it pretty easy/repeatable, at least for me deploying RoR code onto my VPS

All it is basically doing is a git pull, symlinking in the vendor code (gem) cache, doing all the rails preflight ceremony, and updating a "current release" symlink to point at the new folder. Oh and it restarts the servers (nginx, rails).

At a previous job I had an 8-line shell-script that did almost the same thing and it worked for years.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#92
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way less than people think they’re going to. When I started my current job, the project was veering into microservices hell by a team that did not understand how to build a web application. A rough back of envelope calculation of potential customer base and what the product was aimed at (B2B in renewables) told me that even with world domination, the backend of the application would at most have 50k active users ever…

Yup, this is what I'm working on right now. 10 microservices to support a 2 page static html webpage. We "needed" microservices for "Scalability", but we will never have more than a few hundred users at a time. We can't have simple logging of our services, because all logs have to go to Loki, and Loki only does full text search. So first, learn how to query with Grafana's querying language in order to do any searches…

Resume based development!

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#94

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…

Question: how do you reliably deploy? And if it's just scp-ing tarballs, how do you handle dependencies? Do you run & upgrade any third-party processes that rely on having their filesystem or deps? Struggling with this because even in a small app in a Linode box, I don't mind just cp-ing my bins but there's always other things/versions they need. Thinking of bringing in Ansible to help me out here. Deploying feels ea…

If your problem is needing to synchronize a complex mesh of services when you upgrade stuff, the solution is to not have a complex mesh of services that needs managing.

I have a dist-directory, in it is a directory for with each release version, and a symlink current pointing to the current release. To deploy a new version, I create a new directory, unpack each service, and then redirect the symlink ... then "systemctl restart service-name".

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Startup mentality - you preparing to serve 100M users even if you have 1.5 right now and it will be rare luck to have even 1M because if you will not hit high numbers it doomed: high investment will not bring equally high returns and everything will be scrapped.

100M records is ~ 20 GB database. One of my companies needs to deal with large spikes in traffic coming from sudden virality on Tiktok and it peaks at around 8M users within a day or so. I handle all of that on a single beefy Hetzner machine with cycles to spare.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#96

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…

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…

How do you handle authentication without cookies?

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#97

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…

Trying to convince people of that seems to be a loosing battle.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#98
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

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

It took a while and big companies like IBM and organizations like the OSDL and FSG (which became the Linux Foundation) pouring many thousands of person hours and millions of dollars into it. The Linux kernel has plenty of independent "amateur" (not paid to do so) contributors but it's also got a lot of paid contributors for who it's their day job.

It's an awesome mix of contributors but I think there's a definite generational shift around the 2.2/2.4 to a much more capable kernel than 2.0 and before. Had Linux not gotten the financial backing it did I don't know that it would be where it is today.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#99
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way less than people think they’re going to. When I started my current job, the project was veering into microservices hell by a team that did not understand how to build a web application. A rough back of envelope calculation of potential customer base and what the product was aimed at (B2B in renewables) told me that even with world domination, the backend of the application would at most have 50k active users ever…

Yup, this is what I'm working on right now. 10 microservices to support a 2 page static html webpage. We "needed" microservices for "Scalability", but we will never have more than a few hundred users at a time. We can't have simple logging of our services, because all logs have to go to Loki, and Loki only does full text search. So first, learn how to query with Grafana's querying language in order to do any searches…

Sounds all too familiar. We had an application that ran MRI analyses. The web app to manage the jobs was all set up in kubernetes to scale on demand. But is was a basic CRUD app and we had less than 300 users.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#100
post #88

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…

> just a mirage of a better time Don't fall into the "good ol' days" trap. There were more than enough problems/challenges/frustrations to go around back then too.

By good ol' days I meant that everything I've read about them tells me that set of problems and frustrations is better than what we have today, and software was actually made better by those circumstances.

Of course, I can fire up DOS, NeXTStep, or Windows XP and get to doing it on my own, or hack on open sourced codebases from the time, but the key component is the teams of people doing it, and the common wisdom that they had.

Rather than thinking it was heaven, it's a hell I'd prefer over our current one, so to speak.

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