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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#221

Post by ragebol »

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.

Have been that person before. As an intern, and they even listened! In the days of SVN, just before git, so I ran a server in my laptop and my manager somehow decided we needed a big Red hat server or something, IIRC. In a 20 ppl company.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#222

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

nolist_policy wrote: post #51
marcosdumay wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another WTF moment was realisation that MS SQL Server does not support BOOLEAN type. The standard does not have a boolean type. It's a postgres extension that the other open source databases adopted (because, yeah, it's obvious). But the proprietary ones insist on not having. The official recommendation is using byte on MS SQL and char(1) on Oracle. Both are ridiculous.

C programmer joins the chat.

Well, everything is a boolean in ANSI C. If I use `if (a)` I know the code will be executed only if `a` is nonzero.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#223

Post by Waterluvian »

llmblockchain wrote: post #175
malux85 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a few of my horror stories where I was a consultant at various companies: 1. Previous consultants left no documentation or anything, and a running Hadoop cluster handling (live!) 300 credit card transactions a second. Management hired 8 junior sysadmins - who were all windows sysadmins, had never used Linux before, and were expected to take over running this Linux cluster immediately. They all looked at me whi…

"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…

No rank means much. Not even degrees like a PhD. In fact I swear there’s negative correlation.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#224

Post by dafelst »

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 Visual Sourcesafe, that came out around 1995 as well and was the standard source control package for most of the Windows shops in the 90s and even up to the mid 2000s (at least in my experience)

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#225

Post by compiler-guy »

It's hard for those who came into the discipline in the past twenty years to realize just how much things have changed around version control and building.

Joel Spolsky released the "Joel Test" for determining if the software team you were interviewing had good practices in 2000. One of the requirements was that they used version control. Not all that many teams actually did. Especially during the dotcom craze.

Today, passing the Joel Test is table stakes, and it's the rare shop that doesn't. But it took years for that sort of thing to become ubiquitous.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#226

Post by kubectl_h »

cyberax wrote: post #200
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…

In my current company, we're using a similar approach: just shove everything into a JSON blob. If you need a constraint or an index, you can create a computed column (in PostgreSQL) that pulls out a field from JSON. For the data schema, we're using Protobufs with buf validate. This works surprisingly well, you can use the same types in the backend API and on the frontend. We even have a cron job that reads all the da…

Do you go to the trouble of updating individual values in objects using some kind of deep/partial updating function or do you just accept race conditions that come with updating full objects?

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#227

Post by nine_k »

icedchai wrote: post #212
nine_k wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did it run under DOS? I'm not even asking about a win16 native GUI client. (You can still enjoy CVS if you want to contribute to OpenBSD, for instance.)

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#228

Post by doublepg23 »

tryauuum wrote: post #47

Would be great to work in such a company as a Linux guru. There are so many entangled services and machines that you feel like an Indiana Jones. You ssh into a machine and feel century-old dust beneath your footsteps. And you never know what will you find. Maybe a service which holds the company together. Maybe a CPU eating hog which didn't do anything useful last 3 years. I don't enjoy writing new code much. But in…

When I started my recent job the team kept referring to a box running "weird linux". After getting on-boarded and accessing the box it turned out to be running a very old version of OpenBSD. To this day I'm curious who had the wherewithall to install OpenBSD in prod but was seemingly ignorant of the 1yr support cycle.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#229

Post by bartread »

culi wrote: post #197
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…

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

The thing is, I encountered something very similar with a product that had maybe 20 customers… in 2017. All of them had slightly different versions of the codebase. Version control was used, but haphazardly.

You’d think this sort of thing would be a problem of the 90s or early 2000s, but I’d bet you there are any number of companies with similar situations today.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#230

Post by icedchai »

nine_k wrote: post #227
icedchai wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Did it run under DOS? I'm not even asking about a win16 native GUI client. (You can still enjoy CVS if you want to contribute to OpenBSD, for instance.)

I'm not sure. In the mid-90's, I worked at a Solaris and NT shop, which was where I first used it.
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