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

My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

blog.visionarycto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 585 posts

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#191

Post by cxr »

MartinMcGirk wrote: post #18

I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…

> I find myself thinking that maybe if I’d been in civil engineering or something then I’d be building stuff that lasts, but speaking to people who’ve worked a long time in construction has taught me that it’s the same there.

Right. People who assume otherwise aren't spending much time browsing the relevant subjects on Wikipedia or historical registers or just paying attention to their municipality. Simple demonstration: look into how many Carnegie libraries that were built are now gone versus how many are still around.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#193

Post by negamax »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #153

> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated. My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn . And, geez, is the graveyard huge. > Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the c…

> And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

Don't forget Confluence and JIRA and all Atlassian products. Minecraft too. I facepalm when people say Java this and that

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#194

Post by jpgvm »

This is largely why I have tried to build as much as possible with OSS and contribute stuff as necessary to make that possible.

OSS tends to have a much longer relevant shelf-life and experience with it, especially internals remain highly transferable skills.

My work in and around Apache and CNCF ecosystems has been the only code I have written that truly endures in a good way rather than an ossified and decrepit legacy way.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#195

Post by sgtnoodle »

lastangryman wrote: post #162
ThePhysicist wrote: post #73

I think it's normal. Some systems I've built were quite sticky in the sense that they started as prototypes to be scrapped once we figure out the "real" system architecture, and 8 years later they're still in use and integrated into dozens of business processes, so hard to replace. In general, looking back at old code I wrote it seems my solutions were better when I was more naive / less experienced, as I would often…

> as I tend to over-engineer systems and constantly doubt / second-guess my technical decisions I find this as well. I also think that there is a sub-conscious fear as you become more senior that you need to justify that with more elaborate/complex solutions. In my experience there are also a lot of people in software who never come out of the other side of that view and constantly equate "complex" with "good". Being…

Anyone with young children may be familiar with Peppa Pig, an animated British show. Daddy Pig is an expert when it comes to concrete. A far off land sends for him to inspect their concrete, and he travels by overnight train. In the dining car, his breakfast is catered to better than royalty. When he gets there, he taps a block of concrete with his pen, declares it good, and the king and everyone rejoices.

In many ways, that's what it's actually like when you've punched through and become a true expert in your field. Important problems are solved with an overnight sleep, a cup of coffee, and a few careful taps. By the time you get there you're insane, but at least you're offered both coffee and orange juice if you ask.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#196

Post by Hamuko »

negamax wrote: post #193
TacticalCoder wrote: post #153

> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated. My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn . And, geez, is the graveyard huge. > Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the c…

> And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles. Don't forget Confluence and JIRA and all Atlassian products. Minecraft too. I facepalm when people say Java this and that

Who are the people who belong to "I hate Java" and "I love Jira" sets? I'd love to see that Venn diagram.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#199

Post by inejge »

inejge wrote: post #120
sgtnoodle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My coworker and I were pair programming some Rust today. We were working on a convenience wrapper whose whole purpose is to reduce boilerplate. So, by its nature there's a lot of internal generic traits, thread safety, etc. He knows Rust well but software design not so much. I know software design well but Rust not so much. My experience can be summed up with: let &mut writer = Writer ::writer::new( connection.clone(…

> let &mut writer = Writer ::writer::new(connection.clone()).clone(); // TODO ??? writer.write(data.clone()).unwrap(); It's not difficult to arrive at the caricature of baroque generic code if you combine lack of knowledge with miscommunication. The knowledgeable coworker should be aware that a writable object implements the Write trait, and know, or find out, the signature of the Write::write() method. Even fully ge…

Eh, zero on failure, I suppose. The real write(2) syscall returns -1 on failure, and a non-negative value is the number of bytes actually written. But the general point still stands.
Post reply on HN