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The silent majority in software

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: The silent majority in software

#211

Post by shadowgovt »

chrischattin wrote: post #201
progrus wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been programming ~15 years, and from my perspective, those frameworks helped us move on from a world riddled with XSS, “better than fail whale”-level reliability expectations, and software ossification (Gmail, Facebook, etc). Today, the frameworks bite me in the ass about once a week, but I think it’s worth it to get safe React with strict TypeScript, and plenty besides. Caveat: All infrastructure requires a lot…

??? XSS has long been a solved problem. Security is definitely not an argument for using front end JS frameworks as they add attack vectors and complication to the stack.

Assuming your entrypoints are typed, TypeScript makes it much harder to accidentally mishandle data of the wrong type and frameworks make it much harder to inadvertently change state at a distance in a way that was unintended. These are the two most common ways that undesired behaviors are introduced to JavaScript UIs.

Re: The silent majority in software

#212

Post by wnolens »

danielvaughn wrote: post #182
jongjong wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Also, back end tends to have fewer mega-trends. You usually have the option to stick to your old tools. There are still plenty of C/C++ back end jobs for example. The community keeps branching off. On the front end, the trends tend to be more extreme; people will not take you seriously unless you give up on whatever tools you use and go straight for React or VueJS... Then when TypeScript comes along, everyon…

As someone who really appreciates strong typing, I will die on this hill - I hate Typescript. Introducing a transpiled typing system on top of a dynamically typed language is a recipe for all sorts of insane complexity, which is what I experience whenever I try to use TS. If you consider all the time and effort it took to introduce types for every NPM project out there, all the development of the language itself, the…

Did a personal web project and chose TypeScript to see what the rage was about.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to design types. At some points I couldn't figure it out, or I ran into some limitation of the language to express what I need. So my code has a bunch of exclamation points everywhere to assert that a null ain't coming. It feels dirty.

Just too hard to use for me.

Re: The silent majority in software

#213

Post by shadowgovt »

fezfight wrote: post #210
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not what used to be done with HTML. It's what used to be done with desktop GUI toolkits. Web apps were never this complex before the creation of frontend web frameworks.

Yes, that's the point I'm trying to make. At the end of the incredibly complex and long modern road, you end up looking at text, images, etc, in a browser.

At the end of an incredibly complex and long modern road, I end up looking at text and images in any application, but I wouldn't wish upon the developers of, say, IntelliJ that they render the user interface by making their own JNI calls directly to "draw a rectangle" APIs...

Re: The silent majority in software

#214

Post by fassssst »

donatj wrote: post #59

> Sometimes I’ve seen Pull Requests from empty accounts with a brief explanation of what was implemented. They just submit bug fixes, no drama. Over half my coworkers including some very talented developers have no public repos. As someone with almost 200 that always blows my mind. How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest questi…

I’m generally averse to offering my skilled labor for free, so I spend the same effort fixing stuff on internal things and coaching coworkers. This has paid off big time for my career.

I also have a lot of hobbies that scratch the same itch, like making music. In fact, making music feels like more of a whole brain workout than programming, so I’d much rather spend more of my limited time on Earth doing that than writing more code.

Re: The silent majority in software

#215

Post by packetlost »

eternityforest wrote: post #96
silisili wrote: post #6

> Usually, the comments on HN/Reddit are polarised by a single group of people who have the same opinion, Can't speak for Reddit, but that's not at all the case here. For example, I often speak of my hatred of microservices here. I'll get some upvotes and agreement, some people telling me it's a dumb opinion, and some people telling me we're doing it wrong and explain their right way. Believe it or not, I learn a lot…

I don't think microservices are silent majority. They seem like more of a blogger architect who likes to tinker with stuff thing. I would expect the true silent majority just uses monoliths. If it works and doesn't make people complain every day when they work on it, why use a microservice? That's more work. Everyone likes to think of microservices as a modern high tech thing, but to me it seems like old fashioned un…

The silent majority are mostly corporate devs building internal tooling. Microservices are a fantastic method for building distributed, horizontally scaling, dynamic services in a way that's sane. But the overwhelming vast majority of services would be perfectly ok with a simple monolith that occasionally gets a VM spec bump.

Re: The silent majority in software

#216

Post by [deleted] »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #114
eternityforest wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think microservices are silent majority. They seem like more of a blogger architect who likes to tinker with stuff thing. I would expect the true silent majority just uses monoliths. If it works and doesn't make people complain every day when they work on it, why use a microservice? That's more work. Everyone likes to think of microservices as a modern high tech thing, but to me it seems like old fashioned un…

I've joined a company with a silent majority monolith, and joined at the inflection point where they realise their monolith is strangling them... If your dev guide in the wiki says "to run unit tests, use docker-compose exec monolith test some.package.test_class", you're in danger. This company needs to start breaking the monolith down into, well maybe not microservices, but at least smaller monoliths, if they want t…

[deleted]

Re: The silent majority in software

#217

Post by goodpoint »

CrLf wrote: post #161
goodpoint wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> written by incompetent people Which is funny because most modern devops tools are written by organizations with no experience maintaining critical systems or large scale.

Well… many of those tools are written while building those critical systems and scale, so they may include both the learnings as well as the mistakes. And, frankly, most people aren’t building things that are critical or require scale (no matter what they say to make their work sound interesting).

> many of those tools are written while building those critical systems and scale

Very, very few come out of teams working on the real stuff. Both FAANGs and other companies are not going to release their crucial internal tools and not even discuss them in public.

> may include both the learnings as well as the mistakes

"release early" is not something anybody should do for production critical tools like devops stuff.

> frankly, most people aren’t building things that are critical or require scale

100% agree, but if I build ships they have to fit safety standards even if most people never meet rough seas.

Re: The silent majority in software

#218

Post by ksec »

>While browsing HackerNews, I sometimes get the feeling that every developer out there is working for FAANG

Bubbles on HN;

Entry level Web Developers are getting $200K per year working in FAANG or Big Tech. Non-FANNG are getting $150K anyway.

Ruby may be dead, but PHP is even more dead.

Java may rule the enterprise, but you should not mention Java.

No one uses Oracle or MySQL, why would you want that? Postgres is the only DB forward.

Everything should be Remote. Communication should always be Async.

Oh, Ada is the second Forbidden Fruit on HN.

Facebook is...... OK I guess we shouldn't go there.

USB-C will solve all cabling problems. Everything should be USB-C.

5G is useless.

AV1 and AVIF. The video and image standard to rule them all.

Nothing should be centralised. Everything should be distributed.

Finally, The unwritten rule of HN. You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet.

Re: The silent majority in software

#219

Post by wnolens »

donatj wrote: post #59

> Sometimes I’ve seen Pull Requests from empty accounts with a brief explanation of what was implemented. They just submit bug fixes, no drama. Over half my coworkers including some very talented developers have no public repos. As someone with almost 200 that always blows my mind. How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest questi…

I'm literally paid not to.

Re: The silent majority in software

#220

Post by jollybean »

ksec wrote: post #218

>While browsing HackerNews, I sometimes get the feeling that every developer out there is working for FAANG Bubbles on HN; Entry level Web Developers are getting $200K per year working in FAANG or Big Tech. Non-FANNG are getting $150K anyway. Ruby may be dead, but PHP is even more dead. Java may rule the enterprise, but you should not mention Java. No one uses Oracle or MySQL, why would you want that? Postgres is the…

You generally don't need to use Oracle though ...
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