The Return of Fancy Tools • Hacker News Board

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#181

Post by osmarks » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #123

0xCMP wrote: post #58

It's basically cause of mobile. Simple tools often involve using files. Using plain text files too. I don't think the pendulum will swing back the same. Files are a bad abstraction. Databases via HTTP APIs are far more reliable for using between all our devices. Syncing files without something like Git is very painful and for Git to be used the user themselves need to be able to handle the diff themselves correctly.…

That's a fairly dystopian outlook. There's no (technical) reason mobile operating systems can't be just as open as desktop operating systems. The only reason why mobile platforms are locked down are business interests (we're lucky that IBM lost its iron grip over the PC platform early on, otherwise we'd still be stuck in the computing dark ages). (apart from that: a filesystem is nothing else than a database, and tex…

A filesystem is a hierarchical key-value database, which is not what many applications actually want, and plain text is not a data format for anything except structureless human-readable-only, well, plain text. While you could then put some textual format like JSON or ad-hoc space separated values or something into a text file, the tooling around text files may not deal with this very well. And it's slower than something like SQLite and lacks the aforementioned convenient syncing capabilities.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#182

Post by Gravityloss » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

treeman79 wrote: post #171

vasco wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also confirm that in my experience the performance of the JIRA Cloud installation has been mostly fine. It's not amazingly fast but only having used JIRA cloud, even with loads of projects and so on, I always thought it was weird to read all the stories of poor performance.

Compared to something like pivotal tracker, Jira feels like trying to swim in glue. It just gets in the way. Individual actions are tolerable-ish. But it’s never setup right. Constantly hunting for the field that is blocking story creation. Permission issues all over the place. Finding things is often nightmarish. Management basically doesn’t care, and doesn’t want to put effort into making it work in sane fashion. Y…

It's like medieval doctors and hand washing.

Fast solutions clearly exist. But somehow everybody ends up using slow Jira.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#183

Post by dleslie » Sat, May 15, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

porker wrote: post #82

dleslie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I happen to agree. I miss the data analysis tools Jira had at its disposal, and the ability to create home pages with all sorts of graphs, todo lists, and so forth. Since last using Jira I've never felt nearly as aware of the state of a project as when I did.

Yes, dashboards are underrated by those who haven't used them. The data analysis tools did cause problems at one company I worked at. They had a very locked down JIRA install and management were in thrall to the burn-down chart. If you got behind you were hauled over the coals. The burndown chart only considered the rate tickets were closed. So developers started creating extra tickets at the start of a project, so t…

Ha! I was a team lead at a company where something similar happened. Management was obsessed with the burn down chart and equated total completed with productivity.

So I told my team to make tasks as atomic as possible. If it can describe two meaningful changes then it should be two tasks.

I actually preferred this outcome. Instead of a large task for a feature, we had hundreds of tiny tasks that culminated in a feature. It was far easier to get a handle on what was getting done and what was the impediments.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#184

Post by AlotOfReading » Sat, May 15, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

Kinrany wrote: post #108

allset_ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like Jira that much, but this is just blatantly false. > A cache-less refresh for me on a blazing fast dev machine takes between 3-10 minutes on a normal day, though it might only take 1m if the internet gods are feeling particularly merciful I use Jira daily, it's nowhere near this bad. It's not fast, but pages load in about 5 seconds. > changing ticket status can't be done without opening separate pages You…

They probably meant seconds. A website that takes seconds to open is unusable.

I wish I was mistaken, but I do literally mean minutes. I've measured it with a stopwatch before.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#185

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 15, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

mtzet wrote: post #80

solraph wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That integration piece is key. The people who want to replace Atlassian tools usually focus one part of the suite (usually Jira or Confluence), but to replace them you all you need a set of tools that work together. It's not just issue tracking, but alerting, issue management ITSM tools, source control, CI/CD, release management, documentation and I don't know what else that all need talk to each other and provide tr…

On the other hand, I find the integration between Atlassian tools to be pretty barebones. It feels very clear to me that Atlassian tools are really developed separately, with a separate jira task to integrate specific parts. There's no "coherency" to them. You are right that it's difficult to replace the entire Atlassian suite. The thing about Atlassian is that when there's if there's a box to check on a feature list…

[deleted]

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#186

Post by gregors » Sat, May 15, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #106

> Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, no it was not. people didn't migrate from VS to Sublime, they migrated from notepad++ to Sublime. I have never met anyone who stopped using IDEs once they started, except maybe for VSCode with a few hundred plug-ins to reconstruct an IDE piece-wise (but with much less "integration" between the different plug-ins)

Borland, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, Xcode - I've use quite a few IDE's. I much prefer a simplistic vim.

You make a great point regarding reconstruction of IDE's piece-wise. Check out all the "10, 15, 20" VS code plugins you MUST HAVE blog posts. I don't see any difference between that and a tricked out Vim setup. I see them as exactly the same things.

So someone leaving a tweaked out vim for a tweaked out VS Code or vice versa isn't the same as someone leaving an all powerful IDE. Those people are pursuing their perfect bespoke dev experience.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#187

Post by hyperpallium2 » Sat, May 15, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

A tool maps user inputs to results. A programming language is fine-grained - complex input to desired result. A fancy tool is coarse-grained - simple input to result.

As an industry matures, what users want to do is better known and methods for doing are developed, so a coarse-grained mapping becomes possible - on both ends.

But this process can cross industries above, obsoleting entire roles; and below, creating new roles.

A "role" is something requiring complex user input to specify a result.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#188

Post by hinkley » Sat, May 15, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

jruthers wrote: post #72

bitexploder wrote: post #44

First, this is an interesting take, and I think there is some kernels to consider in it. However, the author is painting very broadly with a large brush and smudging a lot. I have been happily using PyCharm/IntelliJ since what feels like the dawn of time. It is a perfectly complex and rewarding Fancy Tool. People still use IDEs for C/C++ this whole time, etc. I think the author is taking their personal journey and ex…

Right. The idea that Jira has been replaced made me laugh. There's probably a crowd of people that want to move on to the next issue tracker flavour and that's fine but I've got work to do that isn't tool shuffling. I'll use the one that integrates with so many of our systems and, though flawed, does a great job.

I am so, so sick of Atlassian’s bullshit.

I remember when we used Trac on a project and it seemed so primitive in many ways, but as soon as I had to use something baroque (broke), I wanted to go back to Trac.

Not to say that Trac isn’t fancy, it just chose a very specific dimension of fancy to focus on and ignored anything else.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#189

Post by hinkley » Sat, May 15, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

mtzet wrote: post #80

solraph wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That integration piece is key. The people who want to replace Atlassian tools usually focus one part of the suite (usually Jira or Confluence), but to replace them you all you need a set of tools that work together. It's not just issue tracking, but alerting, issue management ITSM tools, source control, CI/CD, release management, documentation and I don't know what else that all need talk to each other and provide tr…

On the other hand, I find the integration between Atlassian tools to be pretty barebones. It feels very clear to me that Atlassian tools are really developed separately, with a separate jira task to integrate specific parts. There's no "coherency" to them. You are right that it's difficult to replace the entire Atlassian suite. The thing about Atlassian is that when there's if there's a box to check on a feature list…

It is infuriating the extent to which Atlassians tools are only slightly more integrated with each other than they are integrated with third party tools. If they’d done a better job with their acquisitions then we would all be complaining about how they’ve not done enough for third party tools.

I kind of want a modern version of Trac. Trac is essentially a collection of integrations that just happen to have useful features.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#190

Post by hinkley » Sat, May 15, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

mih wrote: post #125

gknoy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no "coherency" to them. It's interesting to hear you say that. With the integrations we have with Slack and Github, I see previews, summaries, etc thrown at me when I link things

I recently had to upgrade Jira and Confluence at the workplace. It was clear from their configuration methods and how they respond to errors/failures, they are written by different development teams. One needs to be an admin to experience this, ordinary users will see no difference. Take for example the admin UI. When adding "Application Links" to link Jira and Confluence with each other, Jira has a nice tabbed inter…

As a bamboo user who is not an admin, everyone on that team can fuck right off.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to build a CI tool on a concept of information hiding is a monster who should be banished back to whatever eldritch plane they crawled out of.

You can’t have a coherent conversation with anyone about the functionality of Bamboo versus other CI tools because Bamboo is constantly lying to you about what is available. You don’t even know to ask other people for help with something because you don’t know if Bamboo can do it. So people use the ugliest kludges that their privilege level allows to get things done, creating an unmaintainable mess in the process.