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Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

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Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#201

Post by tomnipotent »

ggregoire wrote: post #179

> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Exactly the opposite for me. I just can't stand hovering a variable or a parameter and not getting its exact type, or typing "." after a variable and not having my editor gives me all the available methods on that variable, or running my code just to discover that it instantly crashes because I made a typo or forgot an argument or passed the wrong argument o…

TypeScript, PHP, and Python have support for typing and the commiserate IDE benefits, and I'd imagine these languages account for a super majority of software written in dynamic languages.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#203

Post by gkoberger »

ggregoire wrote: post #179

> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Exactly the opposite for me. I just can't stand hovering a variable or a parameter and not getting its exact type, or typing "." after a variable and not having my editor gives me all the available methods on that variable, or running my code just to discover that it instantly crashes because I made a typo or forgot an argument or passed the wrong argument o…

I think it's a grass-is-always-greener thing?

Early in your career, you lean into one or the other. And then years later, after you're confident you're right, you find yourself trying the opposite paradigm and liking things about it.

Both have pros and cons, and if there was a correct answer we'd all just go with that one!

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#204

Post by sidlls »

ng12 wrote: post #171
sidlls wrote: post #166

> I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. In my experience it’s because they either don’t really know any of the stack well enough to do more than implement someone else’s design, or else they don’t know most of the stack well enough to do even that without very poor, confusing implementations. I’ll take a backend person and a backend person willing to do front end work before a full stack “dev” any d…

> And I’d take the full stack dev before a front end one So you think one person can't know the entire stack but also half of the stack is not complex/important enough to be worth specializing in?

No, I just would have to think really hard to recall a front end specialist who didn’t get bogged down in fad chasing or wrote code better than a backend dev half-assing it.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#205

Post by b3morales »

daenz wrote: post #22
eqmvii wrote: post #5

> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all. This a thousand times. Having empathy for future devs, maintenance, and bug fixes is so important.

Amen. Something bizarre I have noticed though in junior-almost-senior engineers is that they pride themselves in obfuscating and writing "highly complex" logic, with no documentation. It's almost like they are demonstrating their new abilities in the worst way possible. I have been dealing with one of these engineers recently, and they have expressed to me that they love writing because it's so terse. It's been a poi…

I think there's an element of pridefulness too, in having the ability to manage dense and intricate stuff at all. They're very smart, and it makes them feel good to be able exercise that and juggle and retain so much context at once. And they don't realize how fragile that juggling is, that it's going to take a ton of effort for them or other people to come back to it.

I think this is more prevalent for some languages/stacks than others, too; there's definitely a cultural aspect fostered the language owners or whoever the leaders are.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#206

Post by elliotec »

steindavidb wrote: post #160

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.) Highly recommend a journalism class at local community college.

Can you elaborate on that? Why journalism in particular? Have you done this? Are you better at docs?

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#207

Post by tester756 »

daenz wrote: post #18

>Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us. I thought they were going to go the direction of "he's an asshole" and was ready to accept that, but this particular criticism is actually disturbing. People with strong visions can often appear to be "making it up as they go along,…

I have different take on this

I "know" guy who's conference speaker, so he knows other conference speakers, drinks vodka with them and so on.

He says there's significant amount of bullshit aka things that work nice on slides, things that only work cool in theory, but in practice they arent as great

I think that's what OP meant

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#208

Post by dmlittle »

anyfoo wrote: post #194
ggregoire wrote: post #179

> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Exactly the opposite for me. I just can't stand hovering a variable or a parameter and not getting its exact type, or typing "." after a variable and not having my editor gives me all the available methods on that variable, or running my code just to discover that it instantly crashes because I made a typo or forgot an argument or passed the wrong argument o…

As I said in another ranty response in this thread, I do not understand how people enjoy spending time debugging trivial issues, that even a simple static type system would just plain tell them at compile time.

I think it depends on what you’re doing. The author of the the Reddit post mentioned he’s primarily working with data systems. I can see the appeal of someone running quick, ephemeral data analysis not wanting to deal with static typing. But for long term use cases the static typing guard rails is definitely nice.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#209

Post by anyfoo »

tomnipotent wrote: post #201
ggregoire wrote: post #179

> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Exactly the opposite for me. I just can't stand hovering a variable or a parameter and not getting its exact type, or typing "." after a variable and not having my editor gives me all the available methods on that variable, or running my code just to discover that it instantly crashes because I made a typo or forgot an argument or passed the wrong argument o…

TypeScript, PHP, and Python have support for typing and the commiserate IDE benefits, and I'd imagine these languages account for a super majority of software written in dynamic languages.

Yes, I've started using python again with mypy static typing. I can hardly still call it a "dynamically" typed language if I do that, though.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#210

Post by 3pt14159 »

anyfoo wrote: post #194
ggregoire wrote: post #179

> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Exactly the opposite for me. I just can't stand hovering a variable or a parameter and not getting its exact type, or typing "." after a variable and not having my editor gives me all the available methods on that variable, or running my code just to discover that it instantly crashes because I made a typo or forgot an argument or passed the wrong argument o…

As I said in another ranty response in this thread, I do not understand how people enjoy spending time debugging trivial issues, that even a simple static type system would just plain tell them at compile time.

I've been programming for over 20 years too, and I like dynamic languages. I like them a lot more when they're properly tested and well architected, but even the tire fire codebases are at least debuggable. The compiled stuff helps with types catching the trivial bugs, yes, but it's way too complicated to quickly debug things like seg faults. Dynamic languages let you introspect and modify things way more easily, and this makes things like fakes and mocks for testing way easier. It makes debugging easier. And not having to wait an hour for something to compile is nice.

That said, I love the speed of compiled languages. I once converted a simulation from Python to Cython and saw a 10000x performance boost because of CPU caches and all that. Usually the gains are closer to 10x to 20x, but in some rare moments it's like a rocket ship vs a hang glider.

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