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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

#411

Post by digging »

derealized wrote: post #390
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're hard not to love. I often search for a clearcut answer to a technical question and I'm met with a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects. Yeah, thanks for telling me why John from accounting was a dick 10 years ago and you had to code this module in a certain way. I really don't care. I'm new to the codebase and I just want to know how it (the codebase) wor…

Easier said than done, but try telling them that. "I appreciate you sharing context, but it's too much to take in at once. It would work better for me to get a more clear-cut answer."

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#412

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

#413

Post by sumtechguy »

intelVISA wrote: post #160
sumtechguy wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those stacks can be full of 'not invented here'. They are unique and have their own quirks. Quirks that you more than likely can not google for any sort of guidance as to what is going on. I wrote one of those stacks a few years ago. No std libs at all. Why? must fit in 32k and most of that space is needed to hold data. That means throwing a lot of those helper bits out or spend weeks figuring out how to bend the com…

Yeh it's a rough but rewarding life; I spend most of my hours on problems that aren't on Google, or any LLM, so I'm kinda used to it now. (Stockholm) Would love to know of more spaces which require this level of programming - usually I feel kinda underworked at most shops. Though, true enlightenment is combining the urge to NIH with some, light, sensible borrowing from those smarter than us :) very much a key skill u…

The space I was in was IoT type items. Usually hub controllers. The thing is that is getting less and less as you can get a fairly robust thing now with a couple hundred meg of flash and ram for a very reasonable price. So those 'must fit in 32k' items are few and far between these days. With that sort of space you may as well use the proper libs that are usually nicely documented and all the quirks have been seen by hundreds of other poor souls such as yourself.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#414

Post by commandlinefan »

hliyan wrote: post #24

For ten years, I worked on codebases written in C++ without using any third party libraries (no, not even STL -- we needed faster, thread safe versions of strings and maps which were not available at the time; Boost? What's that?), its own custom messaging middleware built directly on sockets, its on distributed process management system built with unix syscalls (obviously). There was not a single line of HTML, Java…

> in C++ without using any third party libraries (no, not even STL

As God intended it!

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#415

Post by giraffe_lady »

diegoperini wrote: post #386
coffeebeqn wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen a few of those. Some are worth their weight in gold. Most are set in their ways from the trauma of trying to make everything not fall apart for so long. Almost all have stagnated and are incapable of bringing in new ideas. Almost all are husks of human beings from putting up and personalizing so much of company dysfunction

> incapable of bringing in new ideas But they are REALLY capable of detecting bad ideas.

They always say no, and are always correct.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#416

Post by ambicapter »

lovecg wrote: post #268
bflesch wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me it was the profound perspective shift from being a leaf node of a tree so to speak to becoming just one link in a long chain. It tends to relax the do-or-die drive quite a bit.

Maybe the do-or-die drive is relaxed because you (or your body) realizes that you've fulfilled your biological purpose and passed on your genes?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#417

Post by sylario »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #107
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.

"... And the AIX machines were a real beast. We had 20 of those things, and each had its own 20 amp circuit. Had a tendency for the grounding to the steel case to fail. If you wanted to upgrade it you'd first need to grab a pair of thick leather gloves...."

I did a real internship (as in it was for my diploma and lasted only a few months) in a medical facility operating Big Machines. I remember a guy soldering a new battery to some old DEC/Digital hardware.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#418

Post by jandrese »

The idea that two interns are going to be able to take over for this guy was the funniest part of the article. Maintaining a large old legacy code base is a hard job because there is so much to learn before you can even start. Codebases like that live that long are often used in important places where a YOLO approach of “test it in production” can cost tremendous amounts of money or even lives. The article makes fun of the guy for only committing hundreds of lines of code, but they worked perfectly the first time and every time.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#419

Post by Aeolun »

kerkeslager wrote: post #337
oytis wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The smugness of people with kids is just annoying.

The ability of people without kids to have a firm belief on how they’d feel with or without them is also astonishing.

I doubt people with kids are smug about it. It’s just been life changing for them, and to some extend they must regret that other people will never get to experience that, especially if they were initially hesitant too.

Anyway, fully agree it makes you appreciate your time more. I enjoy adjusting the flow of time to school age again, even if it’s not my own.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#420

Post by Doxin »

arbitrage wrote: post #328
actionfromafar wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, in those days you could sink Ethernet (broadcast hubs, no switches!) with a faulty or malicious PC spamming the network, too. Didn’t have to reboot the others, though.

> in those days you could sink Ethernet with a faulty PC That is still possible in the modern era.

step one: disable spanning tree, because the LAN is so big it takes half an hour for a port to come up after plugging something in

step two: plug a very cheap switch into the network

step three: have someone move their desk around, and plug a spare cable into the switch at both ends

step four: spend a day doing a binary search by unplugging banks of switches to figure out where the heck all these packets are coming from.

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