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You are never taught how to build quality software

florianbellmann.com

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Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#321

Post by chiefalchemist »

ch4s3 wrote: post #256
t43562 wrote: post #224

The reason I find it easier to work with people who have a degree in Computer Science is that I don't have to convince them of the need for good algorithms and not to try to implement parsers or cryptography by hand. When it comes to software engineering I feel there is no qualification where you can feel that the gross naivety about quality and working in teams (and with other teams) has been similarly ironed out. I…

Hum, interesting perspective. I did 95% of a masters in CS before leaving to do a startup and while I can see the value of parser generators, there are a LOT of times when it is appropriate, useful, and more performant to write your own simple parser. It's often in my opinion the right thing to to first for simple cases. Clearly you should test it and consider functional requirements, but a stringy protocol with clea…

My impression is the gist is: When you think like an engineer, your focus is on problem solving, and using the appropriate tool(s) to do that. On the other hand, typical developers instinct is to code, code, code; at least based on my experience.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#322

Post by npn »

benreesman wrote: post #308

You learn this at quality shops. 10-15 years ago roughly FAANG. Today? TailScale and stuff like that. You can just noT have a bunch of pointless micro services and docker in your runc and layer on layer of json de/re, and unit test to get coverage but ignore quickcheck and hypothesis and fuzzing. You can use stacked diffs and run oncall loops out of the team authoring the code and all of it. You can minimize dynamic…

[flagged]

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#323

Post by pkkm »

t43562 wrote: post #224

The reason I find it easier to work with people who have a degree in Computer Science is that I don't have to convince them of the need for good algorithms and not to try to implement parsers or cryptography by hand. When it comes to software engineering I feel there is no qualification where you can feel that the gross naivety about quality and working in teams (and with other teams) has been similarly ironed out. I…

Cryptography yes, but are you sure about parsers? As far as I can tell, there's some kind of U-curve there. Beginners code them by hand, intermediate-level programmers and intermediate-scope projects use parser generators, and people maintaining the most sophisticated parsers prefer to code them by hand too. For example, GCC used to have a bison parser, but they switched to a hand-coded recursive descent one because that let them produce more helpful error messages. Clang uses recursive descent too.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#324

Post by foobiekr »

ttymck wrote: post #310
benreesman wrote: post #308

You learn this at quality shops. 10-15 years ago roughly FAANG. Today? TailScale and stuff like that. You can just noT have a bunch of pointless micro services and docker in your runc and layer on layer of json de/re, and unit test to get coverage but ignore quickcheck and hypothesis and fuzzing. You can use stacked diffs and run oncall loops out of the team authoring the code and all of it. You can minimize dynamic…

I think the prevailing problem is that quality software often doesn't outperform shit software in terms of revenue, right?

It's not that, it's that quality doesn't matter and mostly neither does technology.

If you are doing network switches or GPUs or server CPUs or whatever, yeah, technology matters. If you are building pretty much any SaaS, MCCA, etc. the tech is literally irrelevant and mostly the more "new" tech you use the worse off you are.

Quality also only matters in some contexts and those are even rarer than the above.

Timing and solving a problem is all that matters in terms of revenue. As long as you aren't too bad, it's fine. The only real five-nines requirement for SaaS is that 99.999% of them would be fine with one or two nines.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#325

Post by foobiekr »

titzer wrote: post #117

We do teach these things, they are just not core CS topics, but rather in other areas, relegated to electives like a software engineering course. At CMU we have entire Master's program for software engineering and an entire PhD program (in my department). We teach exactly the kinds of things the blog post is about, and more. Software Engineering is a whole field, a whole discipline. I get that this is a blog post and…

For years a friend tried to get his department (where he worked as a lecturer) to add a software engineering course where the basic syllabus was to (1) receive a TOI from the last semester and the code base, (2) implement some new features in the code base, (3) deploy and operate the code for awhile, and (4) produce a TOI for the next semester.

The code base was for a simple service that basically provided virus/malware scanning and included the malware scanner and signatures (this ensured there would never be an end to the work - there's always more signatures to add, more features, etc.)

I thought this was a fantastic idea and its a pity he never convinced them. That was more than fifteen years ago, and in his plan it would have just run forever.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#326

Post by maxwelljoslyn »

foobiekr wrote: post #325
titzer wrote: post #117

We do teach these things, they are just not core CS topics, but rather in other areas, relegated to electives like a software engineering course. At CMU we have entire Master's program for software engineering and an entire PhD program (in my department). We teach exactly the kinds of things the blog post is about, and more. Software Engineering is a whole field, a whole discipline. I get that this is a blog post and…

For years a friend tried to get his department (where he worked as a lecturer) to add a software engineering course where the basic syllabus was to (1) receive a TOI from the last semester and the code base, (2) implement some new features in the code base, (3) deploy and operate the code for awhile, and (4) produce a TOI for the next semester. The code base was for a simple service that basically provided virus/malw…

That sounds like an excellent way to do practice that directly mirrors real-world SWE, while still cutting it down to an appropriate size for a pedagogical environment. What a good idea.

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#327

Post by [deleted] »

datadeft wrote: post #90
KeplerBoy wrote: post #18

> It will be necessary to deliver software without bugs in time. Seems like a pretty bad premise to start an article on quality software. If you believe you can ship bug free code, it's time to switch careers.

Spicy take on engineering. Why do we accept this for software when do not accept the same in other engineering domains?

[deleted]

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#328

Post by mwcremer »

foobiekr wrote: post #325
titzer wrote: post #117

We do teach these things, they are just not core CS topics, but rather in other areas, relegated to electives like a software engineering course. At CMU we have entire Master's program for software engineering and an entire PhD program (in my department). We teach exactly the kinds of things the blog post is about, and more. Software Engineering is a whole field, a whole discipline. I get that this is a blog post and…

For years a friend tried to get his department (where he worked as a lecturer) to add a software engineering course where the basic syllabus was to (1) receive a TOI from the last semester and the code base, (2) implement some new features in the code base, (3) deploy and operate the code for awhile, and (4) produce a TOI for the next semester. The code base was for a simple service that basically provided virus/malw…

TOI?

Re: You are never taught how to build quality software

#330

Post by rjzzleep »

foobiekr wrote: post #325
titzer wrote: post #117

We do teach these things, they are just not core CS topics, but rather in other areas, relegated to electives like a software engineering course. At CMU we have entire Master's program for software engineering and an entire PhD program (in my department). We teach exactly the kinds of things the blog post is about, and more. Software Engineering is a whole field, a whole discipline. I get that this is a blog post and…

For years a friend tried to get his department (where he worked as a lecturer) to add a software engineering course where the basic syllabus was to (1) receive a TOI from the last semester and the code base, (2) implement some new features in the code base, (3) deploy and operate the code for awhile, and (4) produce a TOI for the next semester. The code base was for a simple service that basically provided virus/malw…

The thing is for academics quality software sometimes isn't actually quality software.

My experience has been that people who's first jobs were in companies with quality software or who's job included reading through other people's quality software learn to write good software, the other ones learn whatever they saw in the environments they worked in.

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