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Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

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Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#91

Post by McUsr »

BSousa wrote: post #74
McUsr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be so, but when I run something with Node.js in my browser, then I may have to close other things. So, wherever it runs, it really uses too much resources, and therefore I find it as a bad idea from the consumer perspective. It shouldn't be so, that somebody else, should dictate the content of your browser.

Are you sure you know what node.js is?

The short definition would be: "node.js is something that eats up my browsers latency", something along those lines, and as far as I am concerned, that is everything I have to know about it. Node.js is a no stop for me.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#92

Post by [deleted] »

fijal wrote: post #67
didgeoridoo wrote: post #2

The author talks about languages and technologies (JS, Mongo), but he's really getting at something deeper. The real danger of the "ship it" culture is that things that can't be "shipped" right away — things that require solving really hard problems — tend to fall off our collective radar because there is just SO MUCH cool and (relatively) easy stuff to do right now. PG has a great term for this: "schlep blindness":…

The problem runs deeper than that even. Even if you like doing stuff that requires more effort, it's shockingly difficult to find places/people who want to invest/hire you to work on such technology. You have essentially a choice between academia (which is, well, sometimes very academic) and large corpos which have their own share of problems and not everyone fits.

[deleted]

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#93

Post by _pmf_ »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #37
digi_owl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me wonder if this is why i find the whole "devops" concept to be raising my hackles.

How about "full-stack developer"?

> How about "full-stack developer"?

It means you can play both kinds of music: country and western

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#94

Post by _pmf_ »

CmonDev wrote: post #86
makeitsuckless wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the one. That's basically short hand for "you don't need to do anything really well, you just need to do everything barely good enough to ship it now".

The sad bit is that many full-stack developers are actually better that specialized developers in respective skills. (unless of course they are JS/Node.js types)

> The sad bit is that many full-stack developers are actually better that specialized developers in respective skills.

But those do not call themselves full-stack-developers.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#95

Post by _pmf_ »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #13

Every time I see someone quote that JavaScript was designed in ten days I cringe. JavaScript was designed in 1995. It was standardized as ECMAScript in 1997. Ever since then, it's been under active development by a thriving community of engineers pushing for better standards. It's been a bit longer than ten days.

> Every time I see someone quote that JavaScript was designed in ten days I cringe.

Well, the fact is, this does not seem unlikely.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#96

Post by flomo »

pcl wrote: post #51
cwyers wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NaN literally means "not a number." Lots of things aren't numbers. The letter a is not a number. The square root of negative 1 is not a number (at least, not one representable in floating point math). a is not equal to the square root of negative 1.

In practice, NaN as a literal means that the outcome of a mathematical statement is not expressible. So, the letter 'a' is not equal to NaN (with either two or three = signs). NaN, in other words, has a special meaning. Dismayingly, JavaScript's isNaN() function diverges from this special meaning, and does something close to what you said -- it tests to see if something is at least almost a number. So isNaN(13/0) and…

Javascript type coercions might make sense if you realize it was originally designed for a close integration with HTML forms using a simplified proto-DOM ("Level 0").

The idea was more like "isNaN(myForm.myField)"?

For all I know, the above might actually still work. But either way, that explains Javascript type conversion logic.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#97

Post by chii »

mattlutze wrote: post #81
hackuser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps ship-it-now is the right answer for the times. With so many rapid changes in technology there should be 1) a lot of low-hanging fruit (i.e., quick, high-value solutions), making short-term project more valuable and 2) a shorter shelf-life for any solution (i.e., a new tech will make it obsolete), making long-term projects less valuable.

I wonder if ship-it-now isn't more a reflection of the times, rather than the right answer. "Pick off the low-hanging fruit" works for a shop looking to turn some mad profit without having to do a lot of deep thinking. And that's certainly fine. But if that's the culture of the industry, we'd be sacrificing progress and innovation for a quick and ephemeral dollar. There's a quiet theme that runs through the community…

> we'd be sacrificing progress and innovation for a quick and ephemeral dollar.

until the low hanging fruit all got picked.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#98

Post by annnnd »

While I agree with the facts in the article, my own conclusions are quite the opposite (feel free to downvote / flame, but please read the whole response first).

I guess it depends on values - for me, what matters is the value added to customer. Iterating quickly (often) yields better results in this area because it allows you to guess customer expectations early in development process. I have often encountered die-hard engineers who want 100% specification upfront... In my experience, world doesn't work this way. It would be nice if it did, but it doesn't.

And yes, I am guilty. I am using MongoDB AND JavaScript (but not Node.js - not that I have anything against it, just never had the need for it). I don't use these technologies because they are "cool", but because they solve specific problems in an efficient way. Which is probably why hackathon devs used them too. And yes, I would appreciate schema in MongoDB and types in JS, but I can live without it. Life is made of tradeoffs. Does it really matter if latest Fart App (tm) builds on transaction-safe DB and uses strong type language?

So, are we seeing a rise of "shipping culture"? Yes. Does it change how we work? Yes. Is it in some ways worse? Yes. Is it hurting us? No.

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#99

Post by pavlov »

McUsr wrote: post #91
BSousa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you know what node.js is?

The short definition would be: "node.js is something that eats up my browsers latency", something along those lines, and as far as I am concerned, that is everything I have to know about it. Node.js is a no stop for me.

Can you name some of those Node.js apps that have been causing problems for you?

Re: Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

#100

Post by rprospero »

chii wrote: post #97
mattlutze wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if ship-it-now isn't more a reflection of the times, rather than the right answer. "Pick off the low-hanging fruit" works for a shop looking to turn some mad profit without having to do a lot of deep thinking. And that's certainly fine. But if that's the culture of the industry, we'd be sacrificing progress and innovation for a quick and ephemeral dollar. There's a quiet theme that runs through the community…

> we'd be sacrificing progress and innovation for a quick and ephemeral dollar. until the low hanging fruit all got picked.

The problem with that proposal is that we're currently waiting until all of the low hanging fruit got picked. I'm no masochist - if there are nice fruit on the bottom branches, I'm going to pick those. The problem is that the low hanging branches have been picked of all their nice fruit, just leaving the sour, the rotten, and the immature. We could start putting in the effort and climbing the tree for the nice, ripe fruits at the top, but we're being lazy and waiting until we've picked every last worm-filled mush at the bottom.
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