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My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

blog.visionarycto.com

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Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#251

Post by hoc »

Lot's of "near-RAD" tools with large runtimes and platform/environment/framework dependencies in this list.

The typical thing some of us tried to avoid while others (or their employers) totally embraced these comfortable (advertised as productive and fast) and often proprietary tools. The contrasting would be HTML, JS, C/C++, all closer to the bare metal of their respective targets. Or Java and Python as the two that made the race in more complex but purely language levels, as Rust is doing right now. Java has gotten connected more and more to its typical business frameworks these days, so beware :)

Some of them died just with their platform as ObjC/Swift would die with Apple, Kotlin with Android these days.

It seems a split between language and environment/frameworks has proven to provide some stabilty at least.

Seldom (and funny) to see such a "consistent" list, though :) There might be something like "consulting work" as the recurring theme in it. As a product/system/platform developer one might have had (and would have been forced to) put more effort in selecting the tools for long term availability where they are not forced upon you by the platform or time-to-market considerations.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#252

Post by oxryly1 »

adave wrote: post #232
miroljub wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's not to love? Infinitely configurable and extensible system that can accommodate any workflow and any process that comes to mind. It can be used and also misused, but blaming Jira for its misuse is like blaming Lisp because it's too flexible and too powerful.

That's exactly the problem, we need a JIRA that is quick, efficient and not a death trap of a corvette for a 16yr old mental adult. Pretty please....

linear

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#253

Post by Scarblac »

miroljub wrote: post #214
cipher_system wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people who loves JIRA exist for real?

What's not to love? Infinitely configurable and extensible system that can accommodate any workflow and any process that comes to mind. It can be used and also misused, but blaming Jira for its misuse is like blaming Lisp because it's too flexible and too powerful.

That's precisely the problem, that simple workflows need infinite configuration.

But there aren't truly great products on this market, that every organization does things differently puts limits on what is achievable.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#254

Post by animuchan »

josephg wrote: post #228
negamax wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jira does, somehow, faintly smell of Java. There's just something about how slow it is, and how maximalist it is in supporting every whimsical idea that any rich corporate customer has ever asked of them. No matter how poorly the request blended with everything else Jira does. Mind you, I've only ever used Jira when its been setup, poorly, to fit in to a badly designed "scrum" process. People say it can be usable if…

Every company I worked for eventually used Jira, and it's always set up poorly to half-support a badly designed process. At this point that's just a regular Jira installation, I guess.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#255

Post by negamax »

animuchan wrote: post #250
negamax wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Saying that a software is god awful when it's commercially successful is not a good argument. Certainly tons of people and orgs out there are deriving value out of it. I still have to see anything that comes closer to Confluence for arranging organisational knowledge

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#256

Post by mpeg »

I've only been programming professionally for 15~ years and I fully agree with the article.

In my career I've gone through so many tech stacks, most of which are dead or dying today. A lot of my projects you could today replace with a couple API calls or an AWS product.

At least I like to think I learnt a few things along the way that make me a better developer, I never know what to say when recruiters or interviewers ask me about my tech stack experience expecting some sort of very specific answer – to me it makes as much sense as asking whether I have firefox experience, or just chrome.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#257

Post by animuchan »

negamax wrote: post #255
animuchan wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Saying that a software is god awful when it's commercially successful is not a good argument. Certainly tons of people and orgs out there are deriving value out of it. I still have to see anything that comes closer to Confluence for arranging organisational knowledge

Do you imply a positive correlation between quality and commercial success? I don't think I can name many instances of this, really.

E.g. by far the most commercially successful video games are the bottom-of-the-barrel casinos for kids.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#258

Post by WA »

MartinMcGirk wrote: post #18

I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…

Why though? Does it really matter if something outlives you by 200 years? 500? On a not-that-long timeline like 10,000 years, nothing lasts. The "cathedral-like" timeline is completely arbitrary I think.

Imho, there’s freedom in accepting that nothing I produce will last a long time.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#259

Post by itronitron »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #240
josephg wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles. Guilty as charged! I hate using Java because everything written in java seems to blend into the same indistinguishable swamp of classes with meaningless names, full of methods that constantly find new and interesting ways to obscure what your program is actually trying to do. De…

"Anyone who writes class names like FactoryBuilderFactoryImpl and claims to walk in the light is at best a scoundrel, and at worst a follower of a religion so dark we don't name it in polite company." Awesome quote ... LOL.

Nobody writes FactoryBuilderFactoryImpl as a class name, they define an XML schema and then use a code generator to create the source files... 1/2 /s

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#260

Post by WA »

jraph wrote: post #164

That's fine. We build code for issues that are here and now. Like most jobs: they answer immediate needs. The small amount of code that's useful for years or decades needs to be built on a stable foundation and with few dependencies. This probably matters a lot more than the code being a bit messy. It should require as little maintenance as possible. I have two pieces of PHP code I wrote more than 10 years ago, in PH…

Same here. I have PHP code in production that dates back to 2008. zero dependencies, a few quirks, it runs on PHP 7.something for now, might upgrade to 8 at some point.

It’s ugly, but it gets the job done.

Best thing is that front-facing HTML and JS from 10+ years ago still works flawlessly, even though the UI is certainly dated.

But I guess that’s the same with HN, where the design never really changed at all and just works.

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