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Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

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Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#221

Post by RobRivera »

sukruh wrote: post #35

Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs. Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up e…

Vigorous exercise and a love of food gos miles for managi g the creative soul.

Side projects and meditation supplements.

Each year passes and O learn more about myself so hurray growth?

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#222

Post by ravenstine »

digging wrote: post #208
thunky wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing If everyone doesn't follow the standards all the time then there are no standards. Code is not art, it's instructions. If you can't write instructions without adding your own avant garde whitespace brush strokes to it then yes coding for a professional company may not be your jam.

> Code is not art, it's instructions. I'll slightly disagree here because code needs to be read by a computer and by your human teammates. There are times when I'm frustrated because prettier is making a necessary but unintuitive choice and causing my code to become harder to read. But those are rare, and I would never trade them for the guarantee of readable code the other >99% of the time.

Yes, this is fundamentally where I disagree with the person you're responding to and what seems like most programmers (or perhaps mostly web developers). If code is just instructions, it would look barely comprehensible to [most] programmers.

Again, maybe I came off as more extreme than I actually am, because I think that consistent formatting is a very good thing most of the time, but that last 5-10% that programmers in positions of power fetishize is where things can get frustrating and time can get wasted.

The worst is when linter rules are used for things that should be evaluated by a human being in code review. At a previous workplace, someone thought it was a marvelous idea to try and enforce things like functions having no more than 6 lines or some other poppycock. My current workplace is OK, but even then there are some stupid rules like not being allowed to assign `this` to a constant, even though the function in-scope is being re-bound by some stupid middleware making it impossible to use fat arrows or `.bind` (in JavaScript). Sorry, but I'll assign whatever the f*** I want to a constant that isn't escaping the current scope in any way. What's also funny is that I've never worked anywhere that didn't have `eslint-disable` sprinkled everywhere. In many cases, these rules should be warning instead of errors, but because programmers love errors for some reason, virtually every rule violation needs to be an error.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#223

Post by whartung »

I used to (actually I still do) quip about if, back in the day, I spent the money I did on computer equipment instead on woodworking tools, not only would I have a shop that could probably compare with Norm Abraham’s, but id still have a majority of them and they’d still work.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#224

Post by MyFirstSass »

Aeolun wrote: post #75
MyFirstSass wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same in many industries. I have friends who are restaurateurs and people are often extremely ungrateful, demanding and straight up mean. Most don't earn a lot, margins are slim and people are late, you have to perform 100% for each dish, then people don't show up, get mad when arriving late, want well done when they say rare, or think the chef can just magically change the recipes to accommodate bizarre allergies or…

I find that after about 15 years of it I have a pretty good intuition for when it’s a ‘me’ problem versus an external one.

Definitely a problem on my end sometimes, but usually i'll figure that out if i just grind hard enough, the crazy time sinks are almost always from miscommunication somewhere in some org.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#225

Post by ravenstine »

cjonas wrote: post #176
ravenstine wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm not articulating my point very well. I absolutely agree that consistency, in principle, is usually a very good thing. My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing, which it's not. Treating code formatting as rules rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time and unnecessarily tyrannical. In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's a meaningful difference between…

Does your company not just use an automatic formatter? Set a prettier config, format the entire codebase and never have to deal with another formatting change in a PR ever again.

There's formatting, and there's linting.

But my issue with formatting, while great most of the time, is that sometimes I want to violate it, and tooling around automatic formatting and format validation is usually installed with the intention that it is 100% correct all the time. Sorry, but as a senior programmer, sometimes it really should be up to me to decide whether code belongs on a single line, and I don't want to fight against automatic formatting or the CI pipeline throwing a hissy fit when I desire that discretion.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#226

Post by ravenstine »

Arainach wrote: post #153
ravenstine wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm not articulating my point very well. I absolutely agree that consistency, in principle, is usually a very good thing. My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing, which it's not. Treating code formatting as rules rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time and unnecessarily tyrannical. In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's a meaningful difference between…

Arguing about what 5% is appropriate is a significant distraction. I do not believe that any benefits from allowing these discrepancies are superior to the reduced mental load in authoring, reading, and reviewing code of "the linter is automatic and true". If a rule can be written into a linter, simply have it automatically formatted and never argue about it again. It eliminates entire classes of argument.

> Arguing about what 5% is appropriate is a significant distraction.

Yes.

> If a rule can be written into a linter, simply have it automatically formatted and never argue about it again.

That is unless one believes to have good reason to violate that rule, in which case suddenly time is being spent having practically the same conversation in this part of the thread that I started.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#227

Post by erellsworth »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #177

It s not software that s absurb, it s society at large that is. Starting with the insane pointless bureaucracy then trickling all the way down into every single aspect of our lives. I love coding. And I love woodworking too: there are so many videos out there to help you get started. Learning to use dowels was quite the revelation for me. Still very scared of the table saw (Don t have one yet).

I think a little bit of fear is a good thing when it comes to power tools, especially those that have spinning blades. That said, if you have the budget a SawStop might help you overcome your fear enough to start using a table saw.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#228

Post by ryandrake »

thunky wrote: post #165
ravenstine wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm not articulating my point very well. I absolutely agree that consistency, in principle, is usually a very good thing. My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing, which it's not. Treating code formatting as rules rather than suggestions, in my experience, is a waste of time and unnecessarily tyrannical. In terms of mere code formatting, I don't buy that there's a meaningful difference between…

> My objection is to the idea that it's always a good thing If everyone doesn't follow the standards all the time then there are no standards. Code is not art, it's instructions. If you can't write instructions without adding your own avant garde whitespace brush strokes to it then yes coding for a professional company may not be your jam.

> Code is not art, it's instructions.

This is one of the major differences between hobby programming and work programming. When you're writing code as a hobby, it can be anything you want: code can be art, instructions, math, beauty, a means to an end, an experiment... At work, code must ultimately be a tool that creates profit. It has to be manageable, consistent, and boring.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#229

Post by ruszki »

IshKebab wrote: post #181
conductr wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like if that task took 8 days you’d end up having to explain everything that happened and why it couldn’t be done in 1.

What would you rather - it took 8 days and you said it would take 1-8 days, or it took 8 days and you said it would take exactly 4 days ? In any case, there should be absolutely no problem explaining why it took 8 days if it really did.

I never understood this sentiment. It seems to me that the communication is broken, when a developer has problems with delays. It’s not their decision, and it’s not their risk. If developers report uncertainties properly, even during development, when a previously unknown unknown appears, or a known unknown takes longer than it was estimated, it’s not their fault. If this doesn’t happen, it’s obviously difficult to explain. Otherwise, I never had problems with even delays 4x the original estimation, because every party knew even from the start, that we had no idea how the end result would look like.

Re: Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

#230

Post by gspencley »

sukruh wrote: post #35

Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs. Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up e…

I'm one of those creative types. I have woodworking shop, I'm a musician, my wife and I are part-time performing magicians.

I've only ever worked for small start-ups. Including my own which paid the bills for 15 years.

Working for start-ups does not solve the problem for me.

The problem for me is that I need to give a shit about WHAT I'm creating. And I find that after 25 years of working in the tech industry professionally, as an end user the older I get the less interest in modern technology I have.

It's hard for me to not see the negatives. I want a car that I can maintain myself and that does not talk to a network for critical functions. I want a fridge that just cools my food and doesn't come with an app or "smart" features. I have zero interest in AI. I love writing code, and I'm already over-burdened by poor code quality that I've inherited and that was written by inexperienced devs. I don't need AI generating code for me that I then need to review and refactor. It's faster and more fulfilling for me to write it myself. I never got on the smart phone bandwagon. Yes, I own one, but I often forget where I left it and when I find it the battery is usually dead because I haven't touched it in days. I don't want a "smart home." I'm not a gamer.

So in my off hours, I find that I spend my time doing things that don't touch modern tech at all.

So yeah, I find myself constantly planning my exit strategy from the industry. I enjoy coding, making things and solving problems but I don't enjoy modern technology the way that I used to. And making products that I wouldn't use myself is what I find soul crushing.

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