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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

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Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#271

Post by citrin_ru »

another_kel wrote: post #96
citrin_ru wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How bloated software can become is limited by available hardware resources. 20-30 years ago typical RAM size / CPU core count where much smaller than nowadays. If you run desktop software written 20 years ago on modern hardware it would work much faster than modern desktop software with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). But I'd agree that there was plenty bloated software which run slow on hardware…

> with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). Is that really the case? Are 2010 skype and 2022 discord comparable in terms of functionality? Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable? Todo app 15 years ago was a simple CRUD app. Today todo app has to do CRUD, sync, offline mode, public API, integrations with popular services, collaborative projects and support 6 platforms. People whine about bloate…

> I still remember how bad it was before electron as a windows user. Half the apps that seemed cool(omnifocus, bear notes) had mac only desktop version, other(1password, evernote) had a native windows version that felt ugly and unpolished.

My experience was very different, may be because I don't care much about how an app looks but care is it allows me to do what I need to do fast. Before electron most apps followed Microsoft UI guidelines, had consistent look and feel, hot keys for most functions with basic hot keys (like save/open/help e. t. c.) consistent in different apps, low UI latency (unless the system is swapping but electron made this problem worse by using more RAM).

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#272

Post by rendaw »

bob1029 wrote: post #115
agentultra wrote: post #7

I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP. The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify y…

I've had similar experience working on a B2B product that we sell to financial institutions. As the end users got a taste for our UX, they began to threaten resignation if they had to go back to the old system. Word of mouth and human competition are a hell of a thing. Once a branch manager sees how efficiently someone across the street is running their business (which is effectively identical due to mountainous regu…

Software developers miss it too. Most libraries are pushed for how efficient they are, how few allocations they have, which algorithms they use, etc. regardless of in what circumstances they're being used, and easy to use libraries are assumed to be making a significant tradeoff.

Ease of use isn't something that can be measured though, and most people don't have the framework for arguing UX decisions so debates come down to "well I think this is easier to use than that". Maybe not SAP, but no matter how terrible a system is there's someone who's used to it and will argue that it's easier to use than the alternative, and that proponents of the alternative just need to get used to it.

I kind of feel like this is something a leader with a feel for it needs to dictate. Torvalds made a similar comment about good sense with Julian Hamano, which I don't feel effectively supports this, but I do agree with at some level.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#273

Post by lkbm »

astrange wrote: post #237
lkbm wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imported Coinbase Pro transactions and they all got counted as short-term gains because they'd been moved from Coinbase to Coinbase Pro within the past year, despite having been purchased several years prior. Now, you can definitely make the case that this is mostly Coinbase's fault for not sending over the actual purchase date, but TurboTax charged me a bunch of money to do that import, so I feel like they should…

But that's an example of you overpaying - no need for audit insurance if you're making mistakes in their favor. I don't think it does wash sales across different brokers properly though, but neither does anyone else.

Oh, I definitely don't worry about audit insurance, and operate on the assumption that the IRS will be non-antagonistic towards me if I make a mistake. I want to pay the correct amount in taxes, and the IRS wants me to pay the correct amount in taxes. We're on the same side, and my understanding is that they'll act as if we're on the same side unless there's clear reason to believe otherwise.

What I'm objecting to is the idea that I'm not going to get my taxes wrong using TurboTax. They fucked up badly.

I'm certainly not arguing that the solution is to buy audit insurance from the same company that told me to overpay by several thousand dollars. Every penny I pay to Intuit is a moral failing on my part, and on the part of the legislature that succumbed to their lobbying.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#274

Post by quanticle »

jrumbut wrote: post #267
agentultra wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security is important. What makes SAP secure? I personally found errors in customer systems. And at the time even Microsoft couldn’t implement OAuth2 correctly with regards to the specifications… which is no surprise given how often it had to be amended. A good deal of “security,” even in the enterprise, is a lot of theatre and show boating. Write a formal specification and throw it at a model checker and you’ll prob…

This was a lesson I learned very recently. As a dev, I think about security in terms of exploits and making sure software doesn't have them (as well as having features required to implement user/data policies). An IT person thinks about policies too but for them security is primarily about tools. If a piece of software will work behind their firewall and IDS, integrate with their monitoring software and Active Direct…

Exactly. A lot of developers focus on lack-of-vulnerabilities as the essential aspect of security, when, in reality, for corporate IT, the essential aspect is visibility. It doesn't matter how secure a black-box app purports to be, the mere fact that it's a black box that IT has no visibility into it will (justifiably, IMO) lead IT to treat it as insecure.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#275

Post by Michelangelo11 »

faxmeyourcode wrote: post #79
Michelangelo11 wrote: post #45

"apex predator of grug is complexity complexity bad say again: complexity very bad you say now: complexity very, very bad" https://grugbrain.dev/ No really -- I would bet that the single greatest contribution comes from the massive growth in complexity, in all relevant areas, over the last 20+ years.

Every time I see this posted somewhere it's been long enough for me to forget about it, so I go through and read it again and glean something new from it.

He also has a great Twitter account here: https://mobile.twitter.com/GrugBrainedDev/with_replies

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#276

Post by lkbm »

ajmurmann wrote: post #126
runevault wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I run into a lot of devs on reddit/here/etc that argue "who cares about performance just spin up more containers! I just wanna write {insert slow interpreted language here}."

The slowness of interpreted languages is frequently not the main culprit for slow performance though. Most load times in web apps I've worked on usually were spent doing inefficient or unnecessary DB queries or API requests.

Almost every single time I've had to deal with something being slow in the Python web app I work on, it's been a bad query, or bad ORM usage spawning thousands of additional queries to pull in relations.

I've seen a couple out-of-memory deaths (mostly non-paginated db queries, but compounded with the inefficiency of py2), and occasionally an accidentally quadratic loop (which would be faster in C, but usually can just be made fast in Python with more thoughtful code), but it's almost always the DB—oops, I need to add an index, oops I did a cross join, oops, I'm spawning additional 10 queries for each row returned. The time spent in Python on a slow endpoint is usually negligible.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#277

Post by jrumbut »

quanticle wrote: post #274
jrumbut wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a lesson I learned very recently. As a dev, I think about security in terms of exploits and making sure software doesn't have them (as well as having features required to implement user/data policies). An IT person thinks about policies too but for them security is primarily about tools. If a piece of software will work behind their firewall and IDS, integrate with their monitoring software and Active Direct…

Exactly. A lot of developers focus on lack-of-vulnerabilities as the essential aspect of security, when, in reality, for corporate IT, the essential aspect is visibility . It doesn't matter how secure a black-box app purports to be, the mere fact that it's a black box that IT has no visibility into it will (justifiably, IMO) lead IT to treat it as insecure.

And that's all fine, but when the IT Department turns itself into a black box and doesn't tell anyone what bar software needs to clear to be used that's when shadow IT happens.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#278

Post by ornornor »

eviks wrote: post #266
SilasX wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To this day I always copy comments to the clipboard before submitting them or after I feel like I've put a lot of work into them -- owing to dubious browser UI[2] c. 2000, where e.g. you might accidentally lose focus of the text field, and then the backspace button would navigate backwards[1] and lose everything you had typed up. So my muscle memory is a lot of ctrl-a, c. [1] A mistake that Chrome adopted afterward a…

Still possible to lose data in the modern dubious UI on the web, so you could an extension like GhostText and type comment in a regular text editor where you. get recovery for free even if both apps crash

> GhostText

How did I not know about this?? And it supports Firefox + (neo)vim!

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#279

Post by IIsi50MHz »

agentultra wrote: post #7

I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP. The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify y…

This seems…tangent with…my experience at another small company doing integrations with enterprise software like Sage. The various enterprise systems of course had their own reporting solutions, but customers preferred how ours let them build their own or request designs that they could modify using skills they already had: Excel and Windows.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#280

Post by pas »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #206
Michelangelo11 wrote: post #45

"apex predator of grug is complexity complexity bad say again: complexity very bad you say now: complexity very, very bad" https://grugbrain.dev/ No really -- I would bet that the single greatest contribution comes from the massive growth in complexity, in all relevant areas, over the last 20+ years.

Some of the complexity is, unfortunately, introduced by grugs, because complexity smarter than grug and sometimes pretend is simple. Couple months back, I read an article that made a bold claim: that the old wisdom saying most software is IO-bound stopped being true some time ago; instead, most software nowadays is CPU-bound, typically on parsing JSON. JSON is something that may seem simple to grug, particularly a we…

what? no. most software is 100% architecture bound, because with the available tools and time budget building a synchronous client-server system is the max-bang min-buck solution.

the mainframes are back with a vengeance, as basically everything nowadys is waiting for the network.

or! populating caches (phone book that has a few hundred names in it takes ages to load initially, start menu also, etc.) to avoid said waiting.

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