The Duct Tape Programmer
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The Duct Tape Programmer
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: The Duct Tape Programmer
#2I'm feeling all these mixed emotions right now.
Re: The Duct Tape Programmer
#3At a startup, often duct taping is exactly what you need. It can't be worthless code, but good enough is often what's needed.
You need to build something that will get shipped and work for the next little bit. Then, when you have an avalanche of customers you get to replace the engine in mid-flight. That's the dream.
The scenario where you build hugely scalable infrastructure with squeaky clean code is not the dream.
Re: The Duct Tape Programmer
#4Sometimes duct tape is the way to go, especially when you are working on a project with a small-ish team where your 'hacks' can be easily understood by everyone.
This article is very relevant to my life recently. Recently I have been working on a tool to boot a full development environment in VM. It's just a series of shell scripts (managed by Vagrant, so some "shiny", but nothing crazy). Everyone wanted me to use docker and someOtherShinyThing.js etc, but in the end the shell scripts are simple, predictable, and they work really well.
Re: The Duct Tape Programmer
#5Sometimes duct tape is the way to go, especially when you are working on a project with a small-ish team where your 'hacks' can be easily understood by everyone. This article is very relevant to my life recently. Recently I have been working on a tool to boot a full development environment in VM. It's just a series of shell scripts (managed by Vagrant, so some "shiny", but nothing crazy). Everyone wanted me to use do…
I'm on the other end of it with my current project. The "architect" managed to wire about a dozen third party libraries and frameworks together to create a Frankenstein monster that's quite literally unmaintainable. Every day is a new day of Jenga - touch anything and it all just collapses.
The funny thing is it didn't save time at any point in the project. the learning curve to configure all that was so steep we could have written it ourselves in less time. And sure, with a few dozen scattered lines of code I can add a new feature that's almost exactly what the users are requesting. After three days of perusing stackoverflow for a few days and spending another three days trying to figure out where the new cryptic error message is coming from. "Socket timeout"??? Which socket? For what?
Re: The Duct Tape Programmer
#6I usually turn-off preemption with "Preempt(OFF);" actually the default for that call is OFF.
Just turn-off preemption on all your threads and it only changes tasks when you voluntarily yield. Interrupts are still on.
I think I did make an ass of myself with the SetFlags stuff. Oops. Just learn it.
Re: The Duct Tape Programmer
#7Sometimes duct tape is the way to go, especially when you are working on a project with a small-ish team where your 'hacks' can be easily understood by everyone. This article is very relevant to my life recently. Recently I have been working on a tool to boot a full development environment in VM. It's just a series of shell scripts (managed by Vagrant, so some "shiny", but nothing crazy). Everyone wanted me to use do…
I'm on the other end of it with my current project. The "architect" managed to wire about a dozen third party libraries and frameworks together to create a Frankenstein monster that's quite literally unmaintainable. Every day is a new day of Jenga - touch anything and it all just collapses. The funny thing is it didn't save time at any point in the project. the learning curve to configure all that was so steep we cou…
I feel for ya. People often rail against reinventing the wheel, but 36 times out of 37, I'd rather have an in-house created wheel that rolls how we know it should with code we understand than some 3rd party bag of voodoo that supposedly roles in the desired ways, maybe.
Re: The Duct Tape Programmer
#810+ years and billion+ dollar valuations, Facebook changes it's motto from "Move fast, break things" to "Move fast, stable infra".
I guess thats basically the time and point for you to start worrying about duct tape.
Re: The Duct Tape Programmer
#9Currently rewriting every single line of UI code a pile of duct tape programmer spewed out over the span of two years. Writing functional tests so I know when I break the UI. Documenting everything. Hitting all deadlines.
Using multiple inheritance. Lots of It. In fact, no file is over 150 lines long. Composition pattern in full effect as well. I hope it wards off duct tape programmers for life.
> 2015
> multiple inheritance is hard
ducttape pls
Re: The Duct Tape Programmer
#10Currently rewriting every single line of UI code a pile of duct tape programmer spewed out over the span of two years. Writing functional tests so I know when I break the UI. Documenting everything. Hitting all deadlines. Using multiple inheritance. Lots of It. In fact, no file is over 150 lines long. Composition pattern in full effect as well. I hope it wards off duct tape programmers for life. > 2015 > multiple inh…
Composition...isn't the same as inheritance?