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Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

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Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#221

Post by filipo »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #215
danShumway wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a dirty secret that's fallen out of favor in the Node community, but that helps dramatically with this problem: it is usually a good idea to vendor dependencies for front-end projects (basically any project you're making that isn't being published to NPM). The trick with this is you have to avoid dependencies that compile C code or native binaries as part of their installation process, since those binaries mi…

By “vendoring” dependencies, I’m guessing you are talking about pulling them out of node_modules (into a js/vendor dir), and checking them into your repo, repeating the process every time you want to update. I will make an offering to Cthulhu if it’ll ensure we won't be using webpack and node 10 years from now in order to build those old snapshots without considerable effort.

Not a node dev myself but why not simply reference dependencies with fixed version? According to semver (that is probably what most node projects use anyway), you are free to use latest minor and patch revisions and leave the major fixed. Shouldn‘t this prevent most compatibility problems?

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#222

Post by inglor_cz »

kbenson wrote: post #169
inglor_cz wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I left professional programming to become a writer (in Czech, not in English; pardon my mistakes). It actually has something in common, you still write structured text for living, though your target audience are now people, not machines. Some readers commented that they find my style clear and understandable; maybe it is a carry-over from programming, where you cannot be ambiguous. But I find writing…

> As a computer programmer, you mostly receive negative feedback FWIW there are different types of writing and different types of programming. Writing copy for a bank will probably generate a lot of feedback about mistakes that need to be fixed. Writing code to reduce annoying monotonous tasks for coworkers so it takes ten minutes instead of two hours will get you a lot thank yous from your coworkers, and will also b…

This is a good observation.

The software that I spent most of my time with was a communication tool. So whenever something broke down, people had problems calling or texting one another. This pissed them off, naturally.

OTOH now my bestsellers are about half-forgotten events from world history. Aside from a weird e-mail I received from an even weirder Stalin-apologist, people generally enjoy this kind of reading and do not feel angry about it.

If, on the other hand, I were an investigative journalist and dug out dirt on politicans and mafia, the tone of the e-mails from readers would definitely get rougher, to say the least.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#223

Post by RedShift1 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #86
smoldesu wrote: post #10

The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…

Linux is also stable. The binary interface isn't going to change. It's possible to write Linux software that you can boot directly into and it will never stop working or do anything you don't want it to do.

Because there's a BDFL at the top. Linus understands that the whole point of a kernel is having a stable binary interface to run programs on, anytime somebody wants to break userspace he goes on a rant and rejects the idea, rightfully so.

Many other projects do not follow this way of thinking or don't have a BDFL. They break API's because... someone felt like it? Every once in a while I dig into the changelogs or migration guides of projects (sometimes they don't even have a migration guide which is just awful) and you'll see things like changed names of functions, swapped argument orders or even complete removal of functions. But why? We don't know and my guess is it usually boils down to someone "feeling like it".

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#224

Post by AlchemistCamp »

runawaybottle wrote: post #191
dleslie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, services like Squarespace are devouring the VPS and small-site design industry. Rolling your own services, managing them with cPanel, and paying local kids to build and design it is a quaint throwback.

It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away. That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big da…

A lot of back-end people have already moved into ML or blockchain and I expect the trend to continue.

Devs have been so resilient because learning new things has been a part of the job description for decades.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#225

Post by drran »

CharlesW wrote: post #92
grawprog wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Linux based operating systems and I've used them pretty much exclusively for at least a decade now, and I agree with a lot of your post, but >By cutting away abstraction, I don't think I agree with this take. You haven't cut away abstraction, you've changed to a different kind of abstraction. Linux's 'everything is a file' abstraction is just that, an abstraction. >Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the…

> Every flavour of Linux uses a different layout for its root directories, stores configs in different places and generally is not consistent from distro to distro. As a very casual Linux user (macOS is my daily driver), are there any efforts to solve these "death by 1,000 cuts" arbitrary (I assume) differences?

See File System Hierarchy Standard[0], or `man hier`.

[0]: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/fhs.shtml

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#226

Post by boraoztunc »

“I had fifteen years of experience designing for web clients, she had one year, and yet some how, we were in the same situation: we enjoyed the work, but were utterly confused and overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing complexity of it all. What the hell happened? (That’s a rhetorical question, of course.)”

Exactly how I feel these days.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#227

Post by bborud »

grawprog wrote: post #26
smoldesu wrote: post #10

The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…

I love Linux based operating systems and I've used them pretty much exclusively for at least a decade now, and I agree with a lot of your post, but >By cutting away abstraction, I don't think I agree with this take. You haven't cut away abstraction, you've changed to a different kind of abstraction. Linux's 'everything is a file' abstraction is just that, an abstraction. >Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the…

Simplicity is harder to do than it looks. When you see something simple that actually works, something made to be easy to understand, that can take a lot of work to arrive at. So while it may not be much to look at, few people can actually accomplish that. Unix is a good example. It looks easy, but when you see people try to improve on something the failure rate is quite high.

Let me give you an example of something that used to be clear and trivial in Unix that isn’t anymore because people «improved» it: telling your system about name servers.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#228

Post by gher-shyu3i »

midrus wrote: post #217
gher-shyu3i wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language is quite weak. It doesn't even have enums. I blame the industry who fell for golang's marketing and started shoving golang into places where it doesn't belong.

This. I've already stated it a lot. Go is great if you're building a CLI application, a DNS server, a database, some core infrastructure service, Kubernetes extensions/plugins, etc. But people learn it, get hyped, and want to use it for everything. So now we're spending months doing things that already exist in popular frameworks. Go is not for web development.You're not Google.

I'd argue that golang's application is even less than what you mentioned.

CLI app perhaps, and some simple use case here and there. Databases and infrastructure services need more expressive languages.

I agree with you otherwise.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#229

Post by dopidopHN »

volkk wrote: post #46
mauvehaus wrote: post #37

Confession: as a recovering programmer who made a career change to non-programming, it took at most 30 minutes to say "fuck it" and go with Squarespace. I've never been on the web side of things, but I knew enough HTML in the early aughts to put up a basic informational website. After digging in to some sites I admired, I decided that it was too much distraction from my actual work to roll my own. Granted some of thi…

what kind of work did you get into after programming out of curiosity? rare to see people go the other way

Really? I see a consistent trend of friends and ex coworker exiting the technologies and engineering space to go toward either agriculture, manual crafts and artisanat.

I thought is was obvious. It’s even some type of cliché.

But... now that I’m writing this. All those folks are either French, German or Central European. I currently lives in the US and I see more folks doing bootcamps to archive better income and address their debts.

Hmm. I would be curious to see number about that, because obviously it’s highly anecdotal.

Exemple :

- starting to roof painting company

- starting a small farm business ( direct to farmer market type )

- starting a goat herding business

- becoming a wood worker

- becoming a car mechanic in a communal garage

- becoming a teacher ( of non tech things )

- become a bootcamp teacher

- becoming a kumbutcha brewer

I know myself that I will burn out ( in a soft way ) of tech roles.

To clarify : those folks where able to do it because :

- their state offer reconversion package

- they have tech money

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#230

Post by brunoluiz »

rectang wrote: post #23
MereInterest wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is exactly why any of my hobby projects that involve JS are done with plain JS, with as few libraries as possible. I might pull in specific libraries, but I don't want to pull in a giant framework that will be outdated the next time I decide to work on that particular project.

Another thing I find weird is how bloated static typical site generator tools are. The delivery medium of static HTML is timeless. But the odds that a static site generator with dozens of dependencies will still work N years from now? Grim.

That is why I've changed to Hugo (from Hexo & Gatsby). It does exactly what is supposed to, it doesn't import any dependencies and it is quite fast. Besides, no runtime is required.

I thought about plain HTML, but writing blog articles with it is a bit of a pain. Hugo was quite the right balance.

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