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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

#331

Post by tristor »

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.

Yes, stiction is a real issue in old hard drives. In fact something that used to work well if you were cold booting an old server even in the mid 90s, with the expectations of an immediate migration, was giving the drives a good sharp slap to help break stiction so they could spin up. The only issue is it could cause a head crash. Another fun trick from back in the day was sticking hard drives in the freezer to cause the platters to shrink enough to dislodge the head and restore the air gap if you had a head crash so you could try to recover the data.

As much as I love hardware, I much prefer our current solid state wonderland.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#332

Post by kriro »

Nothing against Arthur Westbook and his career choice [;)] but I think the proper way of turning mastery of a crappy codebase into a career is joining a bug bounty program. Some are big enough (think Yahoo's scope) that you can earn a living mastering them and finding bugs. But won't those bugs dry up eventually you ask...well thankfully new features, API endpoints, (sub)domains etc. are intruduced constantly.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#333

Post by dsm4ck »

gerbilly wrote: post #318

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 wil…

"Most of today's new tech will become tomorrow's 'legacy'" Only the successful ones

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#334

Post by plaugg »

majjam wrote: post #317
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…

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.

90% sure it's "dark matter developers" as in "they never write blogs, they don't go to user groups, they don't tweet or facebook, and you don't often see them at large conferences." - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#335

Post by jjice »

dxuh wrote: post #265
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #93

Don't live to work, work to live. I bet Arthur partied his ass off back in the day, stumbled into work without sleep, napped during retros and refinement. He might be the least useful dev but he's a king at Burning Man. Now with his flush 401k, he can finally retire to make little wooden figurines to sell at the farmers market, where he really just wants to regale people with stories of the biggest fish he ever caugh…

Hard to do if most of your life is work. I find it very hard to find space for an actual life after subtracting a full-time job, exercise, personal hygiene, nutrition, etc. from my waking hours. It's essentially ~2h a day + the weekend, which often also consists of getting stuff done you didn't manage during the week. I hate the thought of my life starting in retirement. Especially if I might be 67 by then, which is…

> Especially if I might be 67 by then, which is the legal retirement age, where I live.

When you say "legal retirement age", what do you mean? Is this to receive some sort of retirement benefit like Social Security in the US? Or is it something else?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#336

Post by baz00 »

arethuza wrote: post #299
baz00 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kids sitting there. All you do is change your EC2 instance size and restart it. Back in my day I had to go and install the RAM by hand. And you know 128Mb of RAM then took up a whole suitcase and weighed more than your laptop The I fall asleep at my desk, periodically waking up shouting "STOP-A!" and hallucinating about being bitten by thick ethernet vampires. Going to make myself a coffin...

"I had to go and install the RAM by hand" When the Sun 4/330 I used to have needed a RAM upgrade someone flew up from London to Edinburgh with the RAM and installed it. Fortunately we were in the Grassmarket about 10 minutes from the Castle so he had plenty of things for him to do to keep him amused until his return flight. Edit: I checked and the max the 4/330 could take was 96MB so I suspect the upgrade was an awes…

Yeah crazy money. My father used to import RAM when it was really really expensive in the 1980s. He used to take it on planes from Taiwan as hand luggage handcuffed to himself because it was that valuable.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#337

Post by kerkeslager »

oytis wrote: post #293
weregiraffe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every moment without them is also unique.

You cannot fully appreciate your moments without kids until you have kids though.

Why do people feel they can make sweeping assertions about other people's experiences like this? You don't know anything about the lives of the billions of childless people out there. Many of us have livestyles that wouldn't be possible if we had children, and our "moments without kids" are totally, incomparably different from your moments without kids.

The smugness of people with kids is just annoying.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#338

Post by sspiff »

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 largely agree. My goals have shifted from having an impact moving the technology world forward to not being frustrated and depressed from work and getting enjoyment and satisfaction from personal small projects with no deadlines.

Since having kids, most of these have shifted from a few months in time to a few years, but they are unambitious, poorly defined and unimportant so who cares if they take a little longer?

My main goal at work is not getting annoyed or frustrated and getting paid well for my time.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#339

Post by bagacrap »

bluGill wrote: post #193
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #159

Retiring at 58 would be awesome. Some people live to work and others work to live. I like what I do but I also have hobbies which I really enjoy. I get that the post is satire but at some point in your career there are diminishing returns on learning new things. If you are somewhat specialized say in backend systems involving scaling, message queues, clustering, etc. it probably isn't a good time investment to learn…

Learning new things is how you keep your mind working. People who sit around doing nothing in retirement tend do die sooner than those who keep busy. What you keep busy with doesn't matter, just do something challenging.

Agreed. I feel the need to learn new things just to keep my learning muscle strong. Sometimes I actually need to learn a new thing, and if I haven't done it in a while, it's scarier.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#340

Post by bayindirh »

plaugg wrote: post #334
majjam wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

90% sure it's "dark matter developers" as in "they never write blogs, they don't go to user groups, they don't tweet or facebook, and you don't often see them at large conferences." - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...

Yeah, that's true. I have a blog, and share the code & docs I write for myself, but my blog is not about programming, and the docs are more like cheat sheets for general public.

Well, the code is just GPLv3 licensed small tools which I develop according to my own needs. Nothing impressive.

I don't use Twitter, Facebook and Reddit anymore. I just converse here, and with a Discord server I really like.

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