Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 588 posts

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#131

Post by Izkata »

stavros wrote: post #45
Nexialist wrote: post #31

My worst codebase story: In my first real job, I worked for a company that maintained a large legacy product programmed in a combination of COBOL and Java. In order to work on the Java side of the product, you checked out individual files from source control to work on, which 'locked' the files and prevented other developers from checking out the same files. This functionality was not part of our actual source contro…

We all take too much for granted how much git "just works", even when it doesn't.

Even those before git - what they're describing sounds a bit like RCS, the precursor to CVS, which came before SVN.

I've never used RCS or CVS myself, but I remember the file locking thing in descriptions of it, and that it was why CVS was named "concurrent" - it fixed that limitation.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#132

Post by agentultra »

The ending is pure gold. Some of the best times in my career were working on a codebase for an application serving folks I knew on a first name basis and had had lunch with.

I could talk through pain points they were having, we’d come up with a solution together, I’d hack up a quick prototype and launch it just to them to try out. We’d tweak it over a couple of weeks and when it was good I’d launch it to all customers.

Messy, ugly code base. But it worked well because it wasn’t over-managed. Just developers doing development. Amazing what happens when you get out of the way of smart, talented people and let them do their work.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#133

Post by nyokodo »

dmd wrote: post #97
hinkley wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should use the Antarctic highlands as a prison colony for people found guilty of writing Stringly Typed Code. Siberia isn’t awful enough for them. I thought people who stuffed multiple independent values into a single database column were the worst and then I saw what people can accomplish without even touching a database.

Ha - we did that too at BMS. We were paying Oracle by the column or something like that, so people would shove entire CSV rows into a single value (because corporate said everything HAD to be in Oracle) and then parse them application-side.

> people would shove entire CSV rows into a single value

So you invented a “no-sql” document database in Oracle.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#134

Post by mleo »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #130
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.

Anecdote seems long before git creation, so Visual SourceSafe maybe. Which did not work well over a WAN. Needed other tools to replicate and synchronize VSS.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#135

Post by randomdata »

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…

> Has it occurred to you that MongoDB exists?

What gain would MongoDB offer here?

You certainly would lose a lot of things, like a well supported path to linking with to the database engine, and a straightforward way to start to introduce relational tables as the project matures. Nothing completely insurmountable, of course, but carry a lot of extra effort for what benefit?

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#136

Post by kolanos »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #130
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.

I'm sure I'm not alone in actually having lived such an experience.

I joined a dynamic DNS provider once that had been around since 1999. Their tech, sadly, had not progressed much beyond that point. Showing the higher ups version control was like showing cavemen fire. Of course once the higher ups arranged to have training sessions led by the new hire for the entire dev team the VP of Engineering couldn't handle it and had me fired. Fun times.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#137

Post by The_Colonel »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #130
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.

At this level of dysfunction, installing git won't do anything. You need a holistic change in thinking which starts with convincing people there's a problem.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#138

Post by djbusby »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #130
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.

I was one of those once. Tried to get CVS in a project.

Then some other dev committed 9MB of tabs 0x09 at the end of a file. Then the site was "slow" (cause the homepage was 10MB). And the blame went to...CVS somehow.

I left.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#139

Post by ufmace »

Nexialist wrote: post #31

My worst codebase story: In my first real job, I worked for a company that maintained a large legacy product programmed in a combination of COBOL and Java. In order to work on the Java side of the product, you checked out individual files from source control to work on, which 'locked' the files and prevented other developers from checking out the same files. This functionality was not part of our actual source contro…

I think a lot of people who've only learned programming in the last 10 years or so don't realize that Git, and even more so the large-scale popularity of Git, is actually pretty new. A lot of programming happened before Git was created, and before it became mature and popular enough to be the default for everyone.

Many of these earlier systems sound terrible and hacky to us, but they were the best that was available at the time. Systems to "lock" files you were working on were pretty common because basically nobody did merges well. Most of them were based on having a server to manage the whole thing too, so they were only really common in corporations and larger and more mature hobbyist teams - this was also before you could spin up a cloud server for most things with a few keystrokes and $5 a month. It's low-effort to spin up a local Git repo to track your work on a tiny personal project, but nobody's going to set up a CVS server for that.

Anybody remember Joel On Software's 12 Steps [0], written in the year 2000, 5 years before the Git project was started? Where "use source control" is Step 1? There's a reason why that's there - at the time it was written, source control was clunky and a pain in the ass to set up, so a lot of smaller companies or ones with less mature development teams never got around to it.

I may be getting a little "old man yells at clouds" here, but be really thankful that Git is FOSS, ubiquitous, works great for 98% of projects, and is superlatively awesome compared to everything that came before it.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#140

Post by tryauuum »

arnorhs wrote: post #101
tryauuum wrote: post #47

Would be great to work in such a company as a Linux guru. There are so many entangled services and machines that you feel like an Indiana Jones. You ssh into a machine and feel century-old dust beneath your footsteps. And you never know what will you find. Maybe a service which holds the company together. Maybe a CPU eating hog which didn't do anything useful last 3 years. I don't enjoy writing new code much. But in…

Well it sounded like there are exactly 0 Linux machines running there.. it's all windows .net / c# and a bunch of native windows apps, as I understood the article. But maybe you can replace your statement with "windows guru" and SSH with "remote desktop" and perhaps that would be fun

well, with linux at least I get get the source code of the kernel and of the MySQL when given a database server which hasn't been restarted for 7 years
Post reply on HN