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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#121

Post by randomdata »

sandebert wrote: post #93
dmd wrote: post #77

Probably some of the worst code I ever worked on was a 12k+ line single file Perl script for dealing with Human Genome Project data, at Bristol-Myers Squibb, in the late 1990s. The primary author of it didn't know about arrays. I'm not sure if he didn't know about them being something that had already been invented, or whether he just didn't know Perl supported them, but either way, he reimplemented them himself on t…

Nice. But I have to ask, considering it was Perl: Could an outsider understand it after you reduced it to 200 lines?

199 of the lines were comments.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#122

Post by carderne »

jancsika wrote: post #116

Oh man, this article reminds me of an article that was a parody of some horrid business logic. Something like this: a "genius" programmer was somehow, for some reason using svn commits as a method dispatcher. Commit ids were sprinkled throughout the codebase. A new hire broke the entire system by adding comments, and comments weren't compatible the bespoke svn method dispatcher. Does anybody remember this article? I…

The Inner JSON Effect. Most recent HN discussion of it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40923258

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#123

Post by Twirrim »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #100
throwup238 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case anyone is looking for a performant way to implement categories like that in Postgres: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33251745 I stumbled across that comment a few years back and it changed the way I handle tags and categories so just sharing it here. If anyone has an equivalent for Sqlite, I’d love to hear it!

It's a relational database: why not just use a PageCategories table with two foreign keys?

That's what my suggestion came down to. A two column table with company id and category id. They had ids already. They could index off category and get the results in split seconds

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#124

Post by ivanjermakov »

jancsika wrote: post #116

Oh man, this article reminds me of an article that was a parody of some horrid business logic. Something like this: a "genius" programmer was somehow, for some reason using svn commits as a method dispatcher. Commit ids were sprinkled throughout the codebase. A new hire broke the entire system by adding comments, and comments weren't compatible the bespoke svn method dispatcher. Does anybody remember this article? I…

Tom is a genius!

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-inner-json-effect

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#125

Post by throwaway173738 »

Vampiero wrote: post #57
PreInternet01 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my experience dabbling in json fields for CRUD apps has been mostly trouble stemming from the lack of typechecks Well, you move the type checks from the database to the app, effectively, which is not a new idea by any means (and a bad idea in many cases), but with JSON, it can actually work out nicely-ish, as long as there are no significant relationships between tables. Practical example: I recently wrote my own S…

> Well, you move the type checks from the database to the app, effectively, which is not a new idea by any means (and a bad idea in many cases), but with JSON, it can actually work out nicely-ish, as long as there are no significant relationships between tables. That way you're throwing away 50% of the reason you use a relational database in the first place. Has it occurred to you that MongoDB exists? Also I don't un…

How does MongoDB handle someone pulling the power cord out of the server? Because that’s another reason to use something like SQLite, and it often gets used in embedded systems.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#126

Post by hleszek »

When I started at my first company, they had a very complex VB application running on dozens of customers around the country, each having some particular needs of course. There was a LOT of global variables (seemingly random 4 uppercase letters) controlling everything.

At some point, the application had some bugs which were not appearing when the application was run in debug mode in Visual Studio. The solution was obvious: installing Visual Studio for each customer on site and teaching the users to run the app in debug mode from Visual Studio. I don't know how they convinced the users to do this and how they managed with the license but it was done.

What happened next was even worse.

There was no version control of course, the code being available on a shared disk on the local network of the company with the code copied over in multiple folders each having its own version, with no particular logic to it either, V1, V2, V2.3, V2a, V2_customer_name, V2_customer_name_fix, ...

After that, when there was a problem for a customer, the programmer went there to debug and modified the code on site. If the bug/problem was impacting other customers, we had to dispatch some guys for each customer to go copy/edit the code for all of them. But if the problem was minor, it was just modified there, and probably saved on the shared folder in some new folder.

What happened next was to be expected: there was no consensus on what was the final version, each customer having slightly different versions, with some still having bugs fixed years before for others.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#127

Post by tbm57 »

Working on something like that would drive me absolutely batty. I am happy you were able to find your zen in the middle of that chaos. This post truly speaks to the human condition

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#128

Post by jbkkd »

Sounds awfully like my first job, with the addition of not having _any_ sort of test - functional, integration or unit. Nothing.

A few months in, when I approached the CTO and asked if I could start writing a test framework, he deemed it a waste of time and said "by the time you'd commit the test, it would go out of date and you'd need to rewrite it".

Naturally, the build would break about 5 times a week.

Boeing was a major customer of this system, so when shit hit the fan at Boeing a while ago, I wasn't surprised.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#130

Post by fouronnes3 »

hleszek wrote: post #126

When I started at my first company, they had a very complex VB application running on dozens of customers around the country, each having some particular needs of course. There was a LOT of global variables (seemingly random 4 uppercase letters) controlling everything. At some point, the application had some bugs which were not appearing when the application was run in debug mode in Visual Studio. The solution was ob…

This is amazing. I can so well imagine a bright young hire joining that team, helpfully offering to "setup this thing called git" only to be laughed out of the meeting by all the "senior" staff.
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