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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#211

Post by gumby »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #130
hleszek wrote: post #126

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.

Astonishingly, It took a long time for revision control to become widespread.

Around 1991 when Cygnus had 6-7 employees and was based in the apartment complex where I lived, none of the GNU codebase was hosted in any sort of revision control. Everything was FTPed around as obscurely named tarballs. We had gathered something like 27 different forks of gdb floating around the net, for example. This was back when forking was generally considered a tragedy, something I managed to change five or six years later).

Rich Pixley came and said “all of our code should be in revision control, and I want to use this newfangled thing called CVS.” Michael was OK with it but John and I were steadfastly opposed. We agreed to an experiment, grudgingly, subject to a whole whiteboard of absurd conditions (“must be transparently integrated into emacs so we don’t have to know it’s there).

Pixley agreed to all of that and then ignored all of it completely. It was immediately such a win that everybody adopted it without complaint, including us two obstreperous a-holes.

A few years later a preventable crisis was how revision control first became client-server.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#212

Post by icedchai »

nine_k wrote: post #206
culi wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask roughly what year this was? I can't even imagine something like that today

Visual Basic was a smash hit released in 1991. For reference, Perforce was released in 1995, Subversion in 2000, git in 2005. RCS existed, but only in the Unix world.

Don't forget CVS, released in 1990. It was popular for about a decade before Subversion took over.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#213

Post by [deleted] »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #40
jsonis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These days, my go-to solution is SQLite with two fields (well, three, if you count the implicit ROWID, which is invaluable for paging!): ID and Data, the latter being a JSONB blob. Really!? Are you building applications by chance or something else? Are you doing raw sql mostly or an ORM/ORM-like library? This surprises me because my experience dabbling in json fields for CRUD apps has been mostly trouble stemming f…

> my experience dabbling in json fields for CRUD apps has been mostly trouble stemming from the lack of typechecks Well, you move the type checks from the database to the app, effectively, which is not a new idea by any means (and a bad idea in many cases), but with JSON, it can actually work out nicely-ish, as long as there are no significant relationships between tables. Practical example: I recently wrote my own S…

[deleted]

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#214

Post by asveikau »

gumby wrote: post #211
fouronnes3 wrote: post #130

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.

Astonishingly, It took a long time for revision control to become widespread. Around 1991 when Cygnus had 6-7 employees and was based in the apartment complex where I lived, none of the GNU codebase was hosted in any sort of revision control. Everything was FTPed around as obscurely named tarballs. We had gathered something like 27 different forks of gdb floating around the net, for example. This was back when forkin…

Linux was managed with tarballs and patch emails until a little over 20 years ago when they started using bitkeeper, then Linus wrote git.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#215

Post by collinmanderson »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #40
jsonis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These days, my go-to solution is SQLite with two fields (well, three, if you count the implicit ROWID, which is invaluable for paging!): ID and Data, the latter being a JSONB blob. Really!? Are you building applications by chance or something else? Are you doing raw sql mostly or an ORM/ORM-like library? This surprises me because my experience dabbling in json fields for CRUD apps has been mostly trouble stemming f…

> my experience dabbling in json fields for CRUD apps has been mostly trouble stemming from the lack of typechecks Well, you move the type checks from the database to the app, effectively, which is not a new idea by any means (and a bad idea in many cases), but with JSON, it can actually work out nicely-ish, as long as there are no significant relationships between tables. Practical example: I recently wrote my own S…

> I recently wrote my own SMTP server (bad idea!)

Recently I’ve been tempted to make an SMTP server that translates emails into a web-hook. Please tell me more horror stories so that I might be convinced not do it.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#216

Post by tehlike »

throwup238 wrote: post #66
Twirrim wrote: post #62

Back about 15 years ago, I worked for a web hosting company that provided some sysadmin consultation services. Customer paid us, and I would take a look. I had one customer who came back with the same request, slightly differently worded, every single month, and every single month I'd say the same thing. They had this site they were running that was essentially a Yellow Pages type site. They had a large set of compan…

In case anyone is looking for a performant way to implement categories like that in Postgres: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33251745 I stumbled across that comment a few years back and it changed the way I handle tags and categories so just sharing it here. If anyone has an equivalent for Sqlite, I’d love to hear it!

postgres also supports gin indexes, so could do int arrays & contains queries, for example.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#217

Post by thayne »

hleszek wrote: post #126

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…

> There was a LOT of global variables (seemingly random 4 uppercase letters) controlling everything.

I once ran across a (c) program that had 26 variables, each one letter long, one for each letter of the alphabet. They were all global variables. And many of them were re-used for completely unrelated things.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#218

Post by codeptualize »

What an amazing read, funny, nostalgic, the duality of the perfect mess but still so much opportunity and ability to make progress, and somehow it all just chugging along.

I feel a lot of this is the difference between theory and practice. Sure each of these things are bad, but probably a lot might have been the right choice at the time, and in a way, most companies, even most projects running for many years, end with similar quirky processes, messes, and hacks.

It's the war stories of what used to be, often only told by the code and the database as the creators have long left.

When I look at our couple year old startup, we have some of these things. Prototypes that just keep functioning and only get more attention when they break, manual processed that sort of make sense but also don't, integrations with systems that were build in the early 2000's (it works, but it ain't pretty). We fix many, but I'm sure some will survive way too long.

As software engineers, especially online, we like to discuss the ideal way to do things, best practices, testing strategies, redundancies, the whole nine yards. When time is of the essence and stakes are high, it all goes out of the window and you gotta just make it work in whatever way is possible to fight another day.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#219

Post by icedchai »

jsonis wrote: post #16
PreInternet01 wrote: post #3

> 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…

> These days, my go-to solution is SQLite with two fields (well, three, if you count the implicit ROWID, which is invaluable for paging!): ID and Data, the latter being a JSONB blob. Really!? Are you building applications by chance or something else? Are you doing raw sql mostly or an ORM/ORM-like library? This surprises me because my experience dabbling in json fields for CRUD apps has been mostly trouble stemming f…

I've worked on a system were a guy "migrated" a database from NoSQL to SQL as a proof-of-concept. Except he really didn't migrate anything. He basically created tables with "ID" (UUID) and "data" (json) columns everywhere. No indexes.

The actual "data" is a mess: different data types for the same JSON field. Imagine storing "price" as both a float and a string, depending on whatever buggy code happened to do the inserts.

It worked enough for a prototype and that was enough for management to believe the project was a success. I can't wait until we actually try and deploy it.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#220

Post by failbuffer »

agentultra wrote: post #132

The ending is pure gold. Some of the best times in my career were working on a codebase for an application serving folks I knew on a first name basis and had had lunch with. I could talk through pain points they were having, we’d come up with a solution together, I’d hack up a quick prototype and launch it just to them to try out. We’d tweak it over a couple of weeks and when it was good I’d launch it to all customer…

... and get them talking directly to the user. I feel that's where the real magic happens.
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