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My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

blog.visionarycto.com

241–250 of 585 posts

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#241

> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated. My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn . And, geez, is the graveyard huge. > Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the c…

I agree with most of what you're saying but some java applets were quite big, just not for everyone. RuneScape is the first that comes to mind, some websites that had lots of flash games also had quite a few java applet games, although I don't remember their names. There was also a google-earth-like program that ran in an applet, although I don't remember its name.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#242

I think it's normal. Some systems I've built were quite sticky in the sense that they started as prototypes to be scrapped once we figure out the "real" system architecture, and 8 years later they're still in use and integrated into dozens of business processes, so hard to replace. In general, looking back at old code I wrote it seems my solutions were better when I was more naive / less experienced, as I would often…

Definitely my experience as well. My dark horse is trying to optimize for speed when i don't need it, and not doing it when i do.

When i was more naive, i'd just stick with the first solution that worked. Now, i find that i'm always worried that someone is going to try to input a 30000-line csv in my tool and that i must use the slightly faster way because it's the right thing to do.

One of my tools to prevent this has been the non-accepted answers from stackoverflow. I find that they are generally of similar quality to the accepted answer, but that because they are less tailored to the (necessarly) different problem, they fit less and have a lesser chance of being accepted despite being more useful to more people.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where python will fall in history - it seems one of the few common languages that gained usage because people like it.

Python is weird. It's a nice language but it was heading for tech debt status along with (maybe) Ruby, then the ML guys went all-in on it and that saved it. But how often do you find new programs being written in Python outside of the ML/AI space? People got burned repeatedly in the 2000s/2010s by building giant empires on the back of dynamically typed scripting languages and they all ended up either doing rewrites i…

It's pretty heavily used anywhere there is data. Ie data engineering, pipelines etc.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#245
post #5

The fun thing is that, until CS slows down, stuff gets better so fast that we get to reimplement the same thing, but 10x better every 5 years or so. First I wrote single threaded code code with automatic memory management, then single threaded synchronous with manual memory management, then synchronous multi-threaded, then async, and then async lock free. Now I am writing async lock free, and the compiler is helping…

>Each time I rewrite this stuff, someone hands me 6-7 figures. This is awesome.

I envy you.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#247
post #171

Ozymandias By Percy Bysshe Shelley I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; An…

The Palace - Rudyard Kipling When I was a King and a Mason - a Master proven and skilled I cleared me ground for a Palace such as a King should build. I decreed and dug down to my levels. Presently under the silt I came on the wreck of a Palace such as a King had built. There was no worth in the fashion - there was no wit in the plan - Hither and thither, aimless, the ruined footings ran - Masonry, brute, mishandled,…

"Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone." -- Jorge Luis Borges, somewhere.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#248

> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated. My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn . And, geez, is the graveyard huge. > Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the c…

> Many may not find Java sexy but the JVM is one heck of a serious piece of tech, with amazing tooling available.

Not only that, what about the guest language folks spitting on the Java libraries and runtime infrasture (written in a mix of C++ and Java) that makes their shinny snowflake possible to start with?

Same applies to the C# bashing on the CLR side.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#249
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are the people who belong to "I hate Java" and "I love Jira" sets? I'd love to see that Venn diagram.

Do people who loves JIRA exist for real?

Yes, hello felow developer, every alternative I used in the last 30 years was worse in enterprise integrations.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#250
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are the people who belong to "I hate Java" and "I love Jira" sets? I'd love to see that Venn diagram.

People don't hate Jira because it's written in Java. They don't know or comprehend that something like Jira or Confluence or Minecraft can be written in Java.

Yup, Jira is indeed very hatable before knowing its implementation details.

I don't know if it's a strong argument for Java however, saying that god-awful software written in it is universally despised, but for reasons other than the language choice.

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