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The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

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Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#15

Post by memefrog »

This post is the programmer equivalent of teenage girls posting photos of themselves captioned with "I'm so ugly" to farm praise from their friends.

I have come to dislike this growing trend that celebrates mediocrity and failure. Posting proudly that you are stupid, terrible and incompetent seems to result in applause and high praise. Why? Why is that a good thing? I hope this was intended to be a parody.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#16

Post by mjr00 »

mcv wrote: post #3

I can't tell if this is an honest call to keep things simple, or if it's meant to ridicule that idea. Because I strongly, deeply agree with some of these points, and am absolutely horrified by some of the others.

> I can't tell if this is an honest call to keep things simple, or if it's meant to ridicule that idea.

Me neither.

All of these things involve tradeoffs. Multiple repos vs monorepo highly depends on your organization. Microservices vs monolith has been discussed to death. A simple, locally-driven deploy process is great for solopreneurs but doesn't scale to full companies. Load balancers might be required depending on your availability requirements. Storing all your data on disk is easier than maintaining a database, but aside from performance bottlenecks, it's harder to define a recovery process (RTO/RPO) in the case of a hardware failure. And as much as I dislike them, there are ease-of-use benefits in using dynamically-typed languages.

The biggest technical challenge in most software engineering roles today is evaluating the pros and cons of these types of choices and choosing the right one for your situation.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#17

Post by pyrale »

Not smart enough for all this, but probably still aware enough of all these issues to find a method that works and actually ship stuff. And I suspect oblivious enough to document their process properly.

I wouldn't have made all the same choices, but I admire the decision-making process.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#19

Post by madeofpalk »

mcv wrote: post #3

I can't tell if this is an honest call to keep things simple, or if it's meant to ridicule that idea. Because I strongly, deeply agree with some of these points, and am absolutely horrified by some of the others.

Skeptical of the person who is "not smart enough to figure out docker", yet is smart enough to know about building a "web application into a self contained statically linked binary executable file".

I think they are smart enough, they just don't want to, or don't see the value in it (even if they've made an uninformed decision)

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#20

Post by lylejantzi3rd »

xupybd wrote: post #2

How can you store program state on disk like that? You'd need serialization and deserialization. A DB might be easier.

> How can you store program state on disk like that? You'd need serialization and deserialization.

You need serialization and deserialization when interacting with a DB, too. You're trusting a library to do most of that for you. This is the difference between a junior engineer and a senior engineer. As a junior engineer, you don't trust your own judgement and use a library. As a senior engineer, you don't trust the library writer's judgement, so you write it yourself.

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