201–210 of 588 posts
> I miss that direct connection. The fast feedback. The lack of making grand plans. There's no date on this article, but it feels "prior to the MongoDB-is-webscale memes" and thus slightly outdated? But, hey, I get where they're coming from. Personally, I used to be very much schema-first, make sure the data makes sense before even thinking about coding. Carefully deciding whether to use an INT data type where a BYTE…
When I started at my first company, they had a very complex VB application running on dozens of customers around the country, each having some particular needs of course. There was a LOT of global variables (seemingly random 4 uppercase letters) controlling everything. At some point, the application had some bugs which were not appearing when the application was run in debug mode in Visual Studio. The solution was ob…
Can I ask roughly what year this was? I can't even imagine something like that today
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> remodeling data types and schemas (which you often do as you build an application, whether or not you thought of a great schema beforehand) This is not my experience, it only happens rarely. I’d like to see an analysis of what causes schema changes that require nontrivial migrations.
Same here. If your entities are modelled mostly correctly you really don't have to worry about migrations that much. It's a bit of a red herring and convenient "problem" pushed by the NoSQL camp. On a relatively neat and well modelled DB, large migrations are usually when relationships change. E.g. One to many becomes a many to many. Really the biggest hurdle is managing the change control to ensure it aligns with yo…
I'm gonna take a wild guess here that you have never worked in unfamiliar domains (like lets say deep cargo shiping or subpremium loans) where your so called subject matter experts provided by client werent the sharpest people you could hope for and actually did not understand what they where doing for most of the time?
Because I on the other hand am very familiar with such projects and doing schema overhaul third time in a row for production system is bread and butter for me.
Schemaless systems is the only reason I'm still developer and not lumberjack.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is amazing. I can so well imagine a bright young hire joining that team, helpfully offering to "setup this thing called git" only to be laughed out of the meeting by all the "senior" staff.
I did this at my first, learned quick oldheads would get flustered and feel challenged if not eased into things a certain way. Ultimately by the time I left I tried to introduce redbeanphp (orm), git for source control, and CakePHP for some structure. Nothing stuck. When I left it was still raw sql string queries, .zip files when they remembered for backups, and 400,000 line php files with everything caked on there.
When I started at my first company, they had a very complex VB application running on dozens of customers around the country, each having some particular needs of course. There was a LOT of global variables (seemingly random 4 uppercase letters) controlling everything. At some point, the application had some bugs which were not appearing when the application was run in debug mode in Visual Studio. The solution was ob…
This is amazing. I can so well imagine a bright young hire joining that team, helpfully offering to "setup this thing called git" only to be laughed out of the meeting by all the "senior" staff.
He had a spreadsheet where he kept track of the versions used by every customer. Once identified the version, he would open (no joke) a drawer in his desk and pick the right USB stick with that version on it.
I've always wondered whether this overhead was a worth price to pay for not wanting to learn a couple of SVN commands.
When I started at my first company, they had a very complex VB application running on dozens of customers around the country, each having some particular needs of course. There was a LOT of global variables (seemingly random 4 uppercase letters) controlling everything. At some point, the application had some bugs which were not appearing when the application was run in debug mode in Visual Studio. The solution was ob…
Can I ask roughly what year this was? I can't even imagine something like that today
For reference, Perforce was released in 1995, Subversion in 2000, git in 2005. RCS existed, but only in the Unix world.
When I started at my first company, they had a very complex VB application running on dozens of customers around the country, each having some particular needs of course. There was a LOT of global variables (seemingly random 4 uppercase letters) controlling everything. At some point, the application had some bugs which were not appearing when the application was run in debug mode in Visual Studio. The solution was ob…
This is amazing. I can so well imagine a bright young hire joining that team, helpfully offering to "setup this thing called git" only to be laughed out of the meeting by all the "senior" staff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Senior" holds no weight with me. I've had plenty dumb founding conversations with "seniors". My favorite was at the company that was self hosting their code. The senior team lead wanted me to help him find a memory leak that plagued the product for months. Customers were told to restart the application every few weeks (this was a C++ application). I sat down with the senior and looked at the code. I spotted the erro…
> I was like, "You know when you do new[] you need to use delete[]?" as all of his deletions were without []. This seems like a pretty major lack of a specific piece of knowledge on the senior developers part, yes, but it seems like a much more unforgivable miss on the part of the code reviewers. Was the team stuck in a rut where only a single person (with coincidentally the same blind spot) was reviewing his code, o…
When I started at my first company, they had a very complex VB application running on dozens of customers around the country, each having some particular needs of course. There was a LOT of global variables (seemingly random 4 uppercase letters) controlling everything. At some point, the application had some bugs which were not appearing when the application was run in debug mode in Visual Studio. The solution was ob…
This is amazing. I can so well imagine a bright young hire joining that team, helpfully offering to "setup this thing called git" only to be laughed out of the meeting by all the "senior" staff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is amazing. I can so well imagine a bright young hire joining that team, helpfully offering to "setup this thing called git" only to be laughed out of the meeting by all the "senior" staff.
Been there. There was this old fashioned developer in one of the companies I worked for a decade ago who never understood nor embraced version control (we were talking of SVN at the time, not even git). Luckily that wasn't the case for all the others developers in the company. But when it came to the projects he owned, I witnessed several scenes along the lines of "hey, customer X has an issue with your component Y,…