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Building for the 99% Developers

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Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#291

Post by urthor »

oblio wrote: post #234
urthor wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one of the 99%. What are some of these problems exactly, that me and my extremely large toolkit of cool things I can curl from Github can't solve? Because I'm not a genius. But I'm real good at stapling together some useful crap.

You'll probably get a long list of stuff that includes things such as: OSes, compilers, game engines, distributed process frameworks, etc. Which as you'll note, are infrastructure things. Things which need 1/100th the manpower (at most!) to maintain. While everyone else is busy churning user-facing apps. You don't need to do that stuff, you career can be extremely successful without ever going near those things, espe…

That's the thing, I think a lot of those are, if not solved, problems where there's a lot of really well established good solutions that exist.

I could, I guess, tackle them. But I've got an appreciation that what's already there is already pretty great.

I suppose that's maybe the answer to my question. You don't need to be 1% to solve a problem as well as the solutions that already exist.

You need to be the 1% to improve on the current state of the art.

Which in a commercial environment, as you can imagine, is exceptionally rare. They are more about finding unsolved problems than iterating on problems already solved by FOSS.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#292

Post by Nextgrid »

drekipus wrote: post #286
akhosravian wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked in large budget games for much of my career (where windows is everywhere) most of them prefer it.

> large budget games no linux support on those games right? then there would be no option to use linux.

To be fair if you’re using a game engine such as Unreal I’d expect most of the game-specific programming to be against that (as an SDK) and it’ll abstract the platform specifics for you. Linux compatibility work, if even required (as in the builds produced by the game engine don’t work out of the box) would be separate from the actual game development work and can be assigned to Linux-specific engineers with their dedicated Linux machines.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#293

Post by ripley12 »

bob1029 wrote: post #15
alberth wrote: post #10

We way over complicate things. SQLite can be used for 95% of real world use cases. And whenever WAL2 + BEGIN CONCURRENT get merged into main, it will be able to handle 99% use cases. And don’t fool yourself into believing you’re not in that 1%.

We've been using SQLite for 100% of our data persistence needs for the last ~5-6 years now. Our largest single environment is probably getting close to 500gb total size. Hundreds of concurrent users are no problem for us, even without these enhancements (we use WAL currently). The biggest single trick I learned was to use 1 sqlite connection instance for the entire lifetime of the application. You can add orders of m…

Nice. That's basically my ideal work environment; if you happen to have an opening for a .NET developer who loves SQLite and databases in general, my contact info is in my profile.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#294

Post by drekipus »

Nextgrid wrote: post #292
drekipus wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> large budget games no linux support on those games right? then there would be no option to use linux.

To be fair if you’re using a game engine such as Unreal I’d expect most of the game-specific programming to be against that (as an SDK) and it’ll abstract the platform specifics for you. Linux compatibility work, if even required (as in the builds produced by the game engine don’t work out of the box) would be separate from the actual game development work and can be assigned to Linux-specific engineers with their de…

I haven't worked in game Dev but I'd imagine that each person would want/require a copy of the game (dev-build, etc) that they could probably test their aspect of development in, which is highly likely going to only run the platform of which they're developing for.

Developing something for like Sony or Nintendo might be more OS agnostic in the developer's seat, but then it relies on the tools working on those OS's.

Windows is never really a choice, it's more "I choose X, which only works reliably on windows"

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#295

Post by TameAntelope »

trasz wrote: post #284
TameAntelope wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree; you add complexity to a stack for a reason, usually to provide functionality that would be difficult to reproduce otherwise. Hand-building a reactive (lowercase r) table with sorting, filtering, etc. that's performant at large data volumes to keep your stack "simple", would be a nightmare to maintain and wouldn't allow other developers to bring prior experience with them when they later have to maintain t…

I agree, but what you are describing is a different thing: it's reinventing the wheel, not avoiding additional complexity. Avoiding additional complexity would be not having that reactive table. (And that of course would probably result in worse user experience, so it's really not a good example of what I've meant.)

> SQLite, a $5 linux VPS, vanilla JS, and a single line deploy script.

This environment would necessitate "reinventing the wheel but so much worse" for anything other than the absolute most trivial applications.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#296

Post by oblio »

urthor wrote: post #291
oblio wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll probably get a long list of stuff that includes things such as: OSes, compilers, game engines, distributed process frameworks, etc. Which as you'll note, are infrastructure things. Things which need 1/100th the manpower (at most!) to maintain. While everyone else is busy churning user-facing apps. You don't need to do that stuff, you career can be extremely successful without ever going near those things, espe…

That's the thing, I think a lot of those are, if not solved, problems where there's a lot of really well established good solutions that exist. I could, I guess, tackle them. But I've got an appreciation that what's already there is already pretty great. I suppose that's maybe the answer to my question. You don't need to be 1% to solve a problem as well as the solutions that already exist. You need to be the 1% to im…

For various reasons (usually control, but frequently spun as "needing to be cutting edge"), some groups or companies do reinvent those wheels and in some lucky cases we get progress. For example Google has recreated several of those things and especially in the data storage field they've probably moved things forward.

But in general I agree with you, the crushing majority of developers out there won't work on those things and won't ever even need to.

It's also a source of not always deserved elitism from the people that work on those things, and I definitely dislike that (there's enough elitism in this field, as-is).

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#297

Post by dxdm »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #95
ryandrake wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things I've learned the hard way is you're never going to attain aspirational software purity in a corporate, commercial software environment. I used to say naive things like "Software should compile cleanly with every warning enabled, produce no lint warnings, have zero memory leaks, and zero crashes." But the only place that is true is in my own personal hobby projects that I am under no pressure to rele…

I've had a similar experience, but I keep on producing less than perfect code even for my hobby projects. What we think of as "high quality code" usually boils down to maintainability. We like code that is easy to understand because it is easy to maintain and evolve further. But maintainability is not an end in itself. The software also has to do what it is intended to do. That is way more important than how the code…

I've seen more sloppy code being kept and built upon, than any code being thrown away.

Once it is sloppy, it does not get easier to make code unsloppy as time goes by. Of course, "not sloppy" does not mean perfect; but it does mean understandable, testable, maintainable and extensible.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#298

Post by valand »

drekipus wrote: post #285
ignoramous wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of: > Here's my point: yes, the whole Internet runs on Unix philosophy. But businesses sure don't. The big problem comes up in my description of pipelines up above: they only parse about 99% correctly, which is fine for your idiotic comments about YouTube videos, but pretty nasty when you mangle critical business data. And when the business dudes get involved, they'd rather do anything than mangle their cr…

> but Windows works consistently. So does SOAP. But not Unix or microformats or REST. I have no idea that windows works consistently (?!) where unix (linux) or REST (?) doesn't. I like the idea of what they're trying to get to, but sometimes it helps to cite examples. imo, LARGELY the reason that "windows=business" is from historical lock-in effects. I, as a linux developer, still get ".xsl" files on the regular, who…

I get the sentiment. Consistent means differently for different person.

As a non power user Windows is consistent enough.

Obviously not for power user who often stray from the green usage path of Windows.

Sort of like comparing working on a nodejs http server project on Windows vs working on a project that extensively uses winapi.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#299

Post by dangerface »

pc86 wrote: post #227
dangerface wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense to me, if business types care about their business data and thats why they use windows, why does the argument start off by pointing out that all the mission critical stuff like email and customer facing sites run on unix? Even Microsoft runs its mission critical stuff on unix. Windows isn't popular because its good at anything its popular because windows it meets the bare minimum and has a huge ma…

"Windows" is a monolithic thing that can be referred to singularly, even across version. Unix is not. The first thing you need to decide if you want to switch to unix is "which distro," when Windows is the distro.

What windows? Datacenter? Essentials? Standard? which one do I need? will I be missing functions I later need? The answer to all of these questions is it probably doesn't matter that much as they all do the same thing.

What distro of linux / unix should you go for? FreeBSD? Fedora? Arch? It probably doesn't matter that much as they all do the same thing.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#300

Post by trasz »

TameAntelope wrote: post #295
trasz wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but what you are describing is a different thing: it's reinventing the wheel, not avoiding additional complexity. Avoiding additional complexity would be not having that reactive table. (And that of course would probably result in worse user experience, so it's really not a good example of what I've meant.)

> SQLite, a $5 linux VPS, vanilla JS, and a single line deploy script. This environment would necessitate "reinventing the wheel but so much worse" for anything other than the absolute most trivial applications.

Not at all - it’s way simpler to set up than anything involving kubernetes, virtualization, or containers, and incomparably easier to fix when it breaks.
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