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Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

taylor.town

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Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#271

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bflesch wrote: post #238
weregiraffe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every moment without them is also unique.

Having kids is such a traumatic, life-changing event. I mean this in the most positive way. I can see why so many people see this as the before/after watershed moment of their lives and ambitions. However, it's understandable that not everyone needs to have kids to come to this realization.

It also makes it feel all the more exploitative that young developers are encouraged to work long hours and put their everything into their job. And that women are de-incentivized to have children by the market, if not capitalist society at large - don't do it, it'll cost you your career! We only give you two weeks of leave after you gave birth. You can't afford child care, or all your wages would be spent on it! etc.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#272

Post by coliveira »

Programming is a job, it is not a mission to save the universe. A few programmers become famous for a combination of talents and luck, but nobody can control either of these things. In the end, 99.99% of programmers do the same things that this guy is making fun of.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#273

Post by [deleted] »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #139

There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small. Anyone pegging their self-worth on that goal is setting themselves up for a lot of mental health struggles. My levels of ambition and relentlessness absolutely shifted after having kids, I used to be absolutely furious about being the best. Now I am very much "fuck you pay me" and my prior…

[deleted]

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#274

Post by djbusby »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #260
josephg wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small. No there aren’t. For every Jonathan Blow, Salvatore Sanfilippo (redis) or Mike Pall (LuaJIT) there are probably thousands of run of the mill developers working at feature factories. You don’t build amazing software by being lucky. Your boss at GenericCo will never go out of their way to…

> No there aren’t. You underestimate the odds of talent in a population of 8 billion humans. > If you think you’re all that, don’t blame your company for “not getting the opportunity”. Please. You already have all the tools you need to code. Make something cool! There are neurosurgery robots operating with my code running in the background for several years now. I am now working on ophthalmic surgery software for sub…

Surgery bots are cool. My software just keeps track of drugs

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#275

Post by icepat »

Shrezzing wrote: post #174
whoisthemachine wrote: post #14

Funny, but there's nothing wrong with that if Arthur was/is happy (which isn't mentioned).

35 years in a single easy role with good job security, plus an early retirement. Arthur was happy.

> The struggle itself towards the lack of bugs is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Arthur happy

My favourite passage from Camus' little known book Software Development is Existentialism

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#276

Post by toastedwedge »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #217
bayindirh wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to be absolutely furious about being the best. I found out that just being better than yourself takes you a long long way. I have never competed, but just did my thing. Then found out that I've already know more and ahead of many people I'm inspired by. Yet, this was not my aim, and still is not. I'm just one of the so-called dark developers. I just do my thing, try to do it better every time, and don't care…

I recently put a little modal on my phone that just says "Compete against yourself" every 30 minutes, and I'm finding it remarkably helpful at focusing my efforts back to what I want to see in the world. I like the mindset of trying to be just a little better than you were, every day. It feels... correctly scaled, somehow.

What does it mean in this context to compete against yourself? Anything at immediately at hand or on the todo list? Or is it just a reminder to get something done you thought of doing but normally wouldn't otherwise?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#277

Post by bob1029 »

ticviking wrote: post #140
hliyan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a massive advantage in being able to see the web tech stack for what it is and wielding it without over-engineering or fanaticism, while your competitors are spending 2-3x on monstrosities that essentially does the same thing, but slower.

The day a professor made me implement a simple http server was the day I achieved code enlightenment. At that level of abstraction it’s all just strings

> At that level of abstraction it’s all just strings

Exactly... I worry about the masses learning of this and gaining literacy over the landed gentry.

PHP/CGI basically had it solved. I emulate PHP in .NET6 today using verbatim and interpolated string operations.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#278

Post by PurpleRamen »

bluGill wrote: post #190
PurpleRamen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought so at first too, but the planned "street performance and dumpster diving" tells a different story.

I know people who enjoy street performance and dumpster diving. Bringing your juggling balls (or guitar) to a street corner and trying to make money gives some pressure that makes it fun - and that you don't need the money means if people don't like you enough to pay it doesn't matter. Likewise people throw away a lot of treasures that you can fix up and sell/give away. If he needs to be a street performer and dumpst…

True, but people usually don't start with this on retirement. And the end of the story is about him planning to eat cat food(?). Not sure how to take this, as it also talks about Soylent and Premium Mix, which are not the cheapest.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#279

Post by the_sleaze9 »

KnobbleMcKnees wrote: post #184
kypro wrote: post #91

I swear this guy exists at every company I've ever worked. He's the guy you go to when you find some legacy code which you have no idea how the hell it works and end up getting a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects. They're hard not to love.

They are hard not to love. They also hate each and every one of you.

This has not been my experience at all

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#280

Post by throw0101b »

bayindirh wrote: post #197
foobarian wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one do not mind that part of computing getting abstracted away by the cloud, whatever its other failings. :-)

Working on the hardware directly is more than half of the fun.

> Working on the hardware directly is more than half of the fun.

It never really worked until you gave blood to the computing gods on a sharp edge of a metal case.

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