Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice. But I have to ask, considering it was Perl: Could an outsider understand it after you reduced it to 200 lines?
Certainly better than they could when it was 12000.
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"We ran out of columns"
141–150 of 588 posts
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can remove the "over a WAN" part: VSS had been designed as a local VCS, so until the addition of a proper server in the mid aught using it over a network share was the only way to actually use it. And it really wasn't good.
I don't know if that made it better, I assume not much, VSS was really trash.
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#143When 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 started in 2008. This is what I did eventually. Over the years I introduced the small company to Linux, git, defensive programming, linting, continuous integration, Scrum..., but only for the new projects and stayed 13 years there.
That old project though was never fixed though, probably still running that way now.
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#144Oh 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
Yes!
Has anyone tried implementing it? If not I'm going to give it a shot. :)
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#145My 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.
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Re: "We ran out of columns"
#146> All that remained were ragtag interns and junior developers. For many people, their first job in software engineering is the worst codebase they will deal with professionally for this reason. The first job hires lot of people with little/no experience. As soon as someone gains some experience than can move on to better paying jobs, where there are better developers with better standards.
Worst code bases are often ones taken over from IT consultancies. They drive young, inexperienced developers working many hours to deliver functionality. While the project may start out “clean” using whatever is the current hotness in technology, at some point getting stuff developed and throwing over the wall to QA is the important part.
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall something similar from my first job, except the shared file locking was a full on feature in Macromedia dreamweaver. CSS was just starting to get adopted and every project we worked on just had one “gobal.css” file. When someone else had global.css locked, you’d call dibs if you needed it next. Inevitably, everyday someone would leave the office and forget to unlock global.css and no one else could get anyth…
It just did this by creating a sentinel file- so if you needed to, you could just delete the file manually.
SVN provided the ability to steal locks, and locks were opt-in so e.g. you wouldn't have made CSS need locks because it's a text file and merges fine. Mandatory locking was mostly for binary work files e.g. PSD and the like.
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, this level of dysfunction takes years to cultivate.
You need the “Dead Sea effect” to be in effect long enough that not only have the good people left, but for them to have been gone long enough that people rising into management have never even worked with somebody competent so they don’t know there’s a better way
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Visual SourceSafe would show that a file was checked out hinting to maybe stay away. Good times.
IIRC SourceSafe could be configured with strict locking or advisory locking? I might be wrong about that. The admin user could override or unlock locked files. We had to do this if a developer left a file checked out after they left, or were on vacation. Nobody knew the admin password for the SourceSafe repository. That was OK though, all you had to do was make a local account on your PC named the same as a the sourc…
> IIRC SourceSafe could be configured with strict locking or advisory locking? I might be wrong about that.
IIRC SourceSafe could be configured with either strict locking (you had to lock a file in order to edit it) or no locking à la SVN (the tool would check if your file was up to date when trying to commit it).
I recall that I spent a while suffering under strict locking at my first internship before a colleague discovered this mode existed and we were able to work more reasonably (there were no editable binary files so locking was never really needed).
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These days, my go-to solution is SQLite with two fields (well, three, if you count the implicit ROWID, which is invaluable for paging!): ID and Data, the latter being a JSONB blob. Really!? Are you building applications by chance or something else? Are you doing raw sql mostly or an ORM/ORM-like library? This surprises me because my experience dabbling in json fields for CRUD apps has been mostly trouble stemming f…
> 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…
> Fortunately, my session database is just 'JSON(B) in a single table', so I was able to add those additional fields without the need for any migrations. And SQLite's `json_extract` makes adding indexes after-the-fact super-easy.
Our solution for a similar situation involving semi-structured data (in postgres) was to double it up: put all the json we send/receive with a vendor into a json field, then anything we actually need to work on gets extracted into regular table/columns. We get all the safety/performance guarantees the database would normally give us, plus historical data for debugging or to extract into a new column if we now need it. The one thing we had to monitor in code reviews was to never use the json field directly for functionality.