Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

taylor.town

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 596 posts

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#311

Post by wrycoder »

foobarian wrote: post #243
bayindirh wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An old IBM tech told me that hard drives failed when power cycling equipment could be temporarily resuscitated by placing the drive on the floor, twisting it hard by hand, then as quickly as possible connecting it back into the machine and powering on. Apparently getting the platters to spin helped them get around a worn out motor that couldn't make the initial spin-up.

Gotta know which way to twist it.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#312

Post by swader999 »

boringg wrote: post #289
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Great for the upside of growth - how do you change it for when you start to age and skills erode a little bit. That would be deeply frustrating. Need to change the model at that point! What to though?

The AI helps a bit, I'm feeling a bit recharged with it, like I have a few more extra years of capable contributing in me. Easier to get stuff done, not getting worn out with technical minutia as much.

Move more into to people skills and relationships. It could be management, marketing, sales, HR, recruiting, mentoring, training. There's a plethora of side functions. Or take a lower paying less demanding role. Do harder technical work that isn't time constrained like open source or personal projects.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#314

Post by submeta »

I've done something like this for a couple of years, albeit not full-time. The project was written in Symfony 1.x and got stuck there, as Symfony moved on to higher versions and wasn't backwards compatible with 1.x. The codebase consisted of thousands of lines of poorly documented and commented code, intermingled with custom JS modules that nobody understood. When management wanted to implement changes, it would take days to comprehend the potential effects on different parts before I could initiate any modifications. The project would have required a complete rewrite, but the management was staunchly against it. This has been the most frustrating and unsatisfying tech work I've ever undertaken, alongside past tasks of migrating MS Access apps.

I sometimes find myself pondering why I didn't cease working on it, especially given the compensation wasn't particularly impressive. It's crucial to recognize and act when you sense that a project is no longer benefiting you, and simply move on.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#316

Post by danesparza »

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.

Or at the very least: incredibly suspicious of every one of you, and very unimpressed with the latest fad in software development.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#317

Post by majjam »

bayindirh wrote: post #206
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…

> 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…

Would you mind expanding on what you mean by ‘dark developer’? I could guess from context but Id appreciate your definition if you dont mind.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#318

Post by gerbilly »

Wasn't this a bit of a self deprecating summary of his own career?

Many of the comments seem to assume that it was written by his colleagues and that the description of his career is condescending or snarky.

Personally, I find it really funny, and that it probably describes many of us, despite the fact that we think we are way too cool to ever be like the character described in the piece.

Most of today's new tech will become tomorrow's 'legacy'. Imagine how your awsum multi lambda hairball deployment will look in 30 years. (If it's even around in three decades.)

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#319

Post by danesparza »

submeta wrote: post #314

I've done something like this for a couple of years, albeit not full-time. The project was written in Symfony 1.x and got stuck there, as Symfony moved on to higher versions and wasn't backwards compatible with 1.x. The codebase consisted of thousands of lines of poorly documented and commented code, intermingled with custom JS modules that nobody understood. When management wanted to implement changes, it would take…

I love that your response to this article is to try to prove you're that guy.

We get it. You're that guy. :-)

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#320

Post by lordnacho »

JustLurking2022 wrote: post #270
lordnacho wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole business model is misunderstood by your average internet commentator. When you have a market, you need someone to be there to provide liquidity. Imagine if you're a farmer and you show up to the market with your wheat, but all the bakers have gone home that day. Or the baker shows up and there's no farmer. The market maker stands around all day offering to buy and sell so that you don't have to wait for the…

You could easily solve all of this without HFTs - you might introduce a few seconds of latency but virtually no real investors care about that level of latency and it would save them billions per year.

Would save money for the market makers too. Assuming someone couldn't get an advantage, and that's the rub.
Post reply on HN