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The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

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Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#41

Post by EnragedParrot »

CM30 wrote: post #35

Honestly, the truly 'smart' programmer isn't someone who does or doesn't use a bunch of techniques or best practices, it's the one who can look at the situation and do what's right for that particular project/job. Most of the things in this post could be the right answer if the project is a weekend side project that's going to get a few hundred views a month, or a website for a small business. Bob's Restaurant doesn'…

There's also the fact that those complex solutions aren't engineered by a solo developer but by teams, typically even multiple teams each working on a compartmentalized piece of the whole thing.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#42

Post by mettamage »

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 think he's just rebelling a bit against the culture of caring about scale and performance. A culture that has been pushed out by FAANG that also has some academic undertones. The subtext he's giving is: it doesn't really matter.

That's what I read into it, because that's what I identify with. I've met so many fellow CS students (back in the day) who cared about performance optimization. I never cared. I just wanted it to be simple, working and done. I cared about clean code because I had a hard time understanding anything else. I felt allergic to over-engineering because it portrays a whole host of thoughts/emotions that just hurt my brain empathizing with it how it would feel if I'd have those. So I kept things simple too.

Usually the repercussions aren't really there. When they are there, then they need to be there and it's usually a sign that your product and the place in the market you're at is evolving. Code is a living thing. Sometimes a big rewrite is necessary, but if that simple unoptimized code held up for 10 years (which is what I'm experiencing), then I'd argue that's okay.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#43

Post by nerdchum »

CM30 wrote: post #35

Honestly, the truly 'smart' programmer isn't someone who does or doesn't use a bunch of techniques or best practices, it's the one who can look at the situation and do what's right for that particular project/job. Most of the things in this post could be the right answer if the project is a weekend side project that's going to get a few hundred views a month, or a website for a small business. Bob's Restaurant doesn'…

Id venture to say that as this is implemented in the authors post this could scale to many many thousands of QPS by just bumping VPS resources. Funnily a lot of these 'simple' techniques actually speed things up like writing to a local disk, or static binary.

Theres no High Availability so in the chance it went down theyd be screwed and have no failover but makes you wonder if its cheaper just to lose traffic for a few minutes while theyre upscaling VPS resources or pay for all the HA scaling stuff running around the clock.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#44

Post by graypegg »

memefrog wrote: post #15

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.

The “10x 1x 0.5x developer” talk at the start is the only thing giving me that feeling. That I find annoyingly grating. Resigning yourself to some self-flagellating label because you don’t like to use docker is just begging for sympathy. I’d be more open to empathizing with the author if they just wrote about why they like their system. Doesn’t have to be a “why X is better Y” where you have to defend everything. Just “how I do Z with out Y” and people might be interested.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#46

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

I appreciate the attempt at honesty, but it's not true that you're too stupid. You're too lazy. A trained monkey could learn these things (I know, because I learned them!) and you're not stupid if you know how to program. There's no shame in being lazy. Let's call a spade a spade.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#47

Post by vsareto »

CM30 wrote: post #35

Honestly, the truly 'smart' programmer isn't someone who does or doesn't use a bunch of techniques or best practices, it's the one who can look at the situation and do what's right for that particular project/job. Most of the things in this post could be the right answer if the project is a weekend side project that's going to get a few hundred views a month, or a website for a small business. Bob's Restaurant doesn'…

Well, they do what's right according to how they learned, which may only be a local 'right' and not a global 'right'. There's so many ways to put things together that you can make it work in a lot of different ways. It becomes more art than engineering or science. Then whether your peers accept whether it was the right thing is up to their preferences too.

All that comes down to the large variety of training everyone in the field gets, from university to youtube tutorials.

It's noisy out there

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#48

Post by jagged-chisel »

osigurdson wrote: post #40
jagged-chisel wrote: post #37

"Smart" is certainly subjective. And one can, given enough time and practice, "figure out" all the things the author listed. The problem is time. A lone dev just can't take the time to setup the full stack every time for every project at every client. What to do? Templates, scripts, pre-made configs ... soon you have a stack that will deploy itself and all you have to think about is structures and algorithms. And now…

I'm convinced the difference between the "10X" dev and the 0.5X dev isn't intelligence, it is rather the strength of the "rabbit hole detector". The 0.5X dev jumps right in, never to be seen again.

OT ramble: I met a -0.5x dev once. .NET dude, lots of experience. Standup, every day, was something gone awry with dependency injection. Every. Single. Day.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#49

Post by malkosta »

Of course you don't need a hammer if got no screws to hit. You probably only worked in very small projects. Use the right tool for the right job. The tradeoffs on each scenario for each tool is one of the most important things we have to learn everyday, on every task. If you can't do that...well, good luck.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#50

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

ianpurton wrote: post #23

> I’m not smart enough to figure out docker confiuration, so instead I compile my web application into a self contained statically linked binary executable file. Good luck getting that to run in different environments because static or not, nearly every executable has dependencies. > I’m not smart enough to figure out cloud services and auto scaling groups, so I just upload my static binary file using scp to a linux…

> Good luck getting that to run in different environments because static or not, nearly every executable has dependencies.

Maybe he's using nix to parameterize his builds with the system architecture, but left it out because it didn't fit his idea for a blog post.

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