Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer • Hacker News Board

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#161

Post by HiFaraz » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 5:50 AM UTC

phnofive wrote: post #64

Spooky23 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naming standards are the ultimate bikeshedding event. Everyone has an opinion and camps develop for various schemes. The last time this happened, I happened to be in a position of influence for the final decision for naming standards. We took an approach designed to piss off everyone... license plates. We used sequential numbers prepended by a pronounceable string, and random words, selected by a system, for internal…

I have been on both the receiving and producing end of a similar decision making process whereby all stakeholders are consulted, and then a solution is provided which has as its only real design consideration - beyond being effective - that no-one gets exactly what they requested. Is there a name for this kind of anti-consensus decision making?

I'd call that a compromise.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#162

Post by zo1 » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 5:55 AM UTC

pbourke wrote: post #95

lonelappde wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad to see in the current century that a group of erstwhile professionals jump to "porn stars".

Why is this being downvoted? It is highly inappropriate to do this in a work context.

It's downvoted I guess because it's inflammatory and causing conflict/political discussion where there was absolutely none. I.e. We're talking about something innocent like naming servers.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#163

Post by Rediscover » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 6:00 AM UTC

yen223 wrote: post #117

landhar wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if there’s a name for this, but my favourite example is settling on UTC as the acronym for Coordinated Universal Time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#E...

ISO stands for the International Organization for Standardization, for largely the same reasons.

Maybe I got the wrong person (on the phone), but it was explained to me the name "ISO" was the Greek word for "sameness" and that Français and English just happened to form /meaningful/ representations for an acronym.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#164

Post by flukus » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 6:15 AM UTC

pbourke wrote: post #95

lonelappde wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad to see in the current century that a group of erstwhile professionals jump to "porn stars".

Why is this being downvoted? It is highly inappropriate to do this in a work context.

Because it's like having subtle adult jokes in Disney movies, the adults get it and the children are oblivious and unharmed by them. Anyone offended by the use of porn star names wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) know what it's referencing.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#165

Post by scarejunba » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 6:21 AM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #81

> in my team culture it’s not frowned upon to “snoop behind” people writing code. Whenever I sensed something interesting going on, I’d roll around and watch what was happening. Agh, I'd hate that. In fact if anything interesting had been going on on my screen it would immediately stop, no way I could work with someone watching. I struggle enough at desks with my back to a door or where people walk by, just can't sto…

How interesting! I thoroughly enjoy it. Oddly though, I always hated performing an instrument in front of someone else. I can only play for myself :D

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#166

Post by Doubl » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 6:24 AM UTC

mikekchar wrote: post #122

Everlag wrote: post #4

The referenced idea of a 'human log' is great[0]. I started doing something similar 4 years ago and it eventually evolved from per-project notes into a full diary. Being able to search for 'August 24 2016' and know exactly what I did that day is quite powerful. I encourage anyone to take 10 minutes(or 30...) at the end of the day to write up what they've done. Just a text file with minimal formatting has scaled to 2.…

I have an admittedly crazy thing I do occasionally. I do 5 minute pomodoros. So it's 5 minutes of writing code followed by 1 minute of reflection. In that one minute, I'll write down what I did in the last 5 minutes (it takes about 10 seconds to write since it isn't much ;-). I'll also add a few TODOs that I'm hoping to do, or break down ones I've already got. Now, 5 minutes seems an impossibly small amount of time,…

If you're 2 or 3 times as productive for a couple of days then you can easily afford to take a day off. How much downtime do you need before you're able to repeat the pattern?

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#167

Post by jedberg » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 6:26 AM UTC

pmiller2 wrote: post #91

galaxyLogic wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Cloud-Computing something that should make it unnecessary to name individual computers?

How do you make a service call or ssh into a machine without a name?

The first thing you should do is question why you're SSHing into a production server in 2019. But after that, usually you can do it by IP address or instance ID.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#168

Post by sidcool » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 6:36 AM UTC

There are other blogs by Neil Kakkar that I really enjoyed, including the one on Human log. It's quite nice and practical. https://neilkakkar.com/the-human-log.html

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#169

Post by afarrell » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 6:53 AM UTC

rakamotog wrote: post #144

harrisonjackson wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it depends on who is creeping. A junior engineer, I'd probably pull them up and start explaining what is going on. A fellow senior engineer I'd probably take a welcome break and ask them to grab a coffee - the only reason they'd be lurking lol. If it is a PM or someone else it might put me on edge - likely because they wouldn't have the context to understand what I was working on and if they didn't say anythi…

The only time I (a PM) would do this is when you are working on validation messages / error messages / user facing text.

Error message phrasing is really very important, but it’s probably better to have that refined in code review or to have some explicit step for it.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#170

Post by teddyh » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 6:54 AM UTC

rileymat2 wrote: post #53

teddyh wrote: post #21

> Naming your clusters? Naming them after the service that runs on them is great, till the point you start running something else on them too. We ended up naming them with our team name. This is covered by RFC 1178¹, Choosing a Name for Your Computer (from 1990): Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine. A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was going to be used to control a nu…

I am not understanding why the machine name could not be changed when it's purpose changed? Is an immutable name unique to that environment?

RFC 1178 answers this:

However, let me add that if you later decide to change a name (to something sensible like you should have chosen in the first place), you are going to be amazed at the amount of pain awaiting you. No matter how easy the manuals suggest it is to change a name, you will find that lots of obscure software has rapidly accumulated which refers to that computer using that now-ugly name. It all has to be found and changed. People mailing to you from other sites have to be told. And you will have to remember that names on old backup media labels correspond to different names.