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Building for the 99% Developers

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Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#201

Post by ratww »

zozbot234 wrote: post #197
urthor wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why did Macintosh fall behind in the late 80s? Why didn't they charge ahead and achieve dominance in the 90s?

They didn't fall behind all that much, they were just too expensive. The PC platform used to be expensive too, but then became quite a bit cheaper in the 1990s.

Yep, that's the answer. But even in 1984 already, the year the Mac was released, there were PC-compatible machines like the Tandy 1000 for less than half: $1200. And the difference became bigger with time. The Mac was $2495 and AFAIK the lowest it got was around $1400 in the 80s. Plus, the Mac was not upgradeable.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#202

Post by democracy »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #108

In the 90s-00s, when I was a younger, (even) more arrogant nerd, I looked down on Microsoft and their stupid technologies: Visual Basic, Access, Word, and more. Simple, limited tools that I only saw ugly, half-broken systems built with. Until I saw a something by Steve Ballmer (I think), explaining that their strategy was to provide tools for those "99% developers". The ones who don't read HN, the ones who don't code…

>> 99% of developers

Not 99% of developers, but 99.99% of problems that need to be solved.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#203

Post by pjmlp »

urthor wrote: post #193
pjmlp wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good way to dive into this is to do consulting for non tech industries, where 100% of IT is a cost center, no matter what.

"I did my job well, everything was running smoothly." Too smoothly. We got 20% layoffs for doing a good job! Cost savings.

That is why one should value the team, not the employer.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#204

Post by democracy »

vasco wrote: post #122
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #108

In the 90s-00s, when I was a younger, (even) more arrogant nerd, I looked down on Microsoft and their stupid technologies: Visual Basic, Access, Word, and more. Simple, limited tools that I only saw ugly, half-broken systems built with. Until I saw a something by Steve Ballmer (I think), explaining that their strategy was to provide tools for those "99% developers". The ones who don't read HN, the ones who don't code…

Your argument suffers from the fact that Ballmer almost tanked the company, so perhaps this rosy look back isn't the whole story, and you need to focus a bit on "get things done" and a bit on "maintain it for the future", it's not as simple as FAANG=good or FAANG=bad. Unless you're happy that all those 99% developers have created towers of COBOL that run the world and they can't touch or upgrade.

Should've they been waiting for Javascript or Scala to be invented?

The most laidback, humorous and mature developers I've met were Cobol developers. (probably older people are like that haha)

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#205

Post by iso1631 »

mro_name wrote: post #167
js8 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macintosh, OS/2, WordPerfect, WordStar, Ami Pro, Quattro Pro.. to name just a few alternatives.

you don't believe accountants care about anything but the market leader, do you?

Which is why we all use wordperfect and lotus 1-2-3

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#206

Post by dangerface »

ignoramous wrote: post #184
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #108

In the 90s-00s, when I was a younger, (even) more arrogant nerd, I looked down on Microsoft and their stupid technologies: Visual Basic, Access, Word, and more. Simple, limited tools that I only saw ugly, half-broken systems built with. Until I saw a something by Steve Ballmer (I think), explaining that their strategy was to provide tools for those "99% developers". The ones who don't read HN, the ones who don't code…

Reminds me of: > Here's my point: yes, the whole Internet runs on Unix philosophy. But businesses sure don't. The big problem comes up in my description of pipelines up above: they only parse about 99% correctly, which is fine for your idiotic comments about YouTube videos, but pretty nasty when you mangle critical business data. And when the business dudes get involved, they'd rather do anything than mangle their cr…

This makes no sense to me, if business types care about their business data and thats why they use windows, why does the argument start off by pointing out that all the mission critical stuff like email and customer facing sites run on unix? Even Microsoft runs its mission critical stuff on unix.

Windows isn't popular because its good at anything its popular because windows it meets the bare minimum and has a huge marketing budget unix doesn't.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#207

Post by alberth »

deathanatos wrote: post #75
alberth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mentioning RDS is an apples to oranges comparison. RDS is a fully managed service by a 3rd party. Nevertheless, checkout https://litestream.io - given that SQLite is just a file, it’s incredibly easy to replicate. Failover is coming in the next release, which is already beta. Also checkout this Expensify blog post on how they use SQLite. It’s scales amazingly well. https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite…

I mention RDS because it mostly solves the failover/continuity problem. While failovers on RDS are typically outages, they're also typically quite short lived, no more than a few minutes. That can work for many people/business's requirements. That it is managed means you (in theory) can rely on AWS to manage the underlying infrastructure. You just worry about the SQL. It is a "boring technology" choice, as the articl…

Instead of just continuously firing off questions when you acknowledge you’re not even reading the articles linked too … nonetheless, bedrockdb has replication and failover.

https://bedrockdb.com/

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#208

Post by maccolgan »

deathanatos wrote: post #53
bjterry wrote: post #19

99% feels like an exaggeration. I've talked to many developers from non-FAANG companies, and it isn't at all uncommon for them to be using GraphQL or serverless. I guess there is some selection bias since they are usually applying to a unicorn, so they are probably more likely to come from environments that fit the "1%". Whether this distinction is relevant to you depends on where you sit. If you are a startup sellin…

… I'm in a small company, and we "use" serverless. I've never once asked myself "Should I move to serverless?" It's just whether, for some application, it's the right tool. We run a few Github bots & a function that updates a Route 53 record on serverless. (Security didn't want to give permission to R53; "too much, too broad"; a lambda that exposed only the necessary action to the service that required it was the com…

You have to have a VM to run a _single_ service? You have no multi-application VMs?

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#209

Post by stevesimmons »

mrtksn wrote: post #152
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #108

In the 90s-00s, when I was a younger, (even) more arrogant nerd, I looked down on Microsoft and their stupid technologies: Visual Basic, Access, Word, and more. Simple, limited tools that I only saw ugly, half-broken systems built with. Until I saw a something by Steve Ballmer (I think), explaining that their strategy was to provide tools for those "99% developers". The ones who don't read HN, the ones who don't code…

Greatly successful projects often have horrible(from developers perspective) codebase that barely doesn't fall apart. They call it technical debt and fix il later when things stop moving fast. I think it's happening because successful projects focus on the product delivering on the reason it exists(i.e. facilitate file transfer in the most intuitive way possible) and to do that quickly as possible for the lowest cost…

> An example for this is UK's covid case tracking early on.

Your choice of the UK's Covid tracking spreadsheet debacle to illustrate your point is curious, to put it politely.

As The Register [1] (and many others) pointed out at the time, it was the wrong tech choice, executed slowly and at huge cost, by the wrong people with little knowledge of better choices, and directed by management and government leaders with track records of lying and incompetence.

> They couldn't have start by firstly building the perfect data collection solution because they wouldn't know how things will pan out and if they tried to force their way(i.e. mandatory formats by the tests centres) it would have been too big of a projects.

I have a different view on every part of this sentence!

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/excel_england_coronav...

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#210

Post by stevesimmons »

stevesimmons wrote: post #209
mrtksn wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greatly successful projects often have horrible(from developers perspective) codebase that barely doesn't fall apart. They call it technical debt and fix il later when things stop moving fast. I think it's happening because successful projects focus on the product delivering on the reason it exists(i.e. facilitate file transfer in the most intuitive way possible) and to do that quickly as possible for the lowest cost…

> An example for this is UK's covid case tracking early on. Your choice of the UK's Covid tracking spreadsheet debacle to illustrate your point is curious, to put it politely. As The Register [1] (and many others) pointed out at the time, it was the wrong tech choice, executed slowly and at huge cost, by the wrong people with little knowledge of better choices, and directed by management and government leaders with t…

By the way, the error happened when the UK was experiencing 7,500 new cases a day.

Pretty much any tech choice (including Excel done sensibly) would work for those volumes.

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