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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#301

Post by cmpalmer52 »

I once had a project to turn a customer’s Excel VBA application into a real application (I used ASP.Net). He had been hacking on this Excel spreadsheet for like 15 years. Once I printed the VBA code because it was hard to navigate and it was like 250+ pages printed out rather compactly.

The worse part wasn’t the code itself (although it was bad), but the fact that there was so much abandoned paths in it and there would be three or more different versions of crucial functions with the same name (or sometimes a different name but doing the same thing) in different places and sometimes all being called by different paths in the workflow. Or not being called at all.

And it was very math heavy (calculating natural gas pressures and flow rates through different sized pipes and fittings and sizing regulators to meet certain loads). Think Excel formulas on cells that referenced 15-20 other cells, each of which was a formula on their own that referenced other pages and cells, some of which were filled by VBA. And that wasn’t even involving the VBA code full of brute force solvers for multi-variable equations that used heuristics he’d worked out by trial and error (if it’s a delta over 1.5, add 5 to this variable, otherwise subtract 3, but if the delta was less than 0.5, add 1 and so on - it eventually converged or found no solution, but a binary solved did the same thing, only faster and easier).

It took me and a junior developer several months, during which, of course, multiple change requests were going through to make it multiuser and secure.

Both my nightmare project and one that I’m very proud of once it was completed.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#302

Post by mnahkies »

linux2647 wrote: post #63
mnahkies wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the intriguing part was purposefully using the same sequence value for rows in multiple tables. I've worked with globally unique (to our application) integer keys, and per table integer sequences (which obviously aren't globally unique), but I don't recall seeing anyone use a global sequence but purposefully reuse elements of the sequence before.

It’s kind of like an idempotency key assigned either by the request or generated at the beginning of processing that request

If the caller/consumer isn't choosing the idempotence key then I don't think it would act as a particularly good one.

In this scenario the database is choosing the id during a transaction and so you'll only find out the value if the transaction successfully commits and the response makes it back to you.

Generally you'd want the client to provide the idempotency key such that whatever failure occurs you know the value and can provide it on a retry such that the server can use it to prevent double entry / etc

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#303

Post by chris_wot »

bsder wrote: post #277
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it astonishingly? Git is not a natural development at all. Obviously, it is a standard right now. But I as a hobby coder at my teens I started out with FileZilla and copying over index2.php, index3.php, index_final.php, index_final_2.php and all of it worked well enough when at that point. I took a little break from that hobby, and it still took me a lot of time to build intuition around Git when I started out…

> Git is not a natural development at all. Obviously, it is a standard right now. Git is actually an unnatural development. Its UI is atrocious. And it worked like crap on Windows for forever. Over time, I taught non-computer people who used Windows all of CVS, Subversion, and Mercurial. They got each one and why things were better. The first time they had to recover something, they really got it. Source control got…

git didn't win because of GitHub. Sure, GitHub helped a lot. But actually, it's because its a DVCS, and it does branching and merging way better than anything I've seen so far.

You can thank BitKeeper for all of this, and Andrew Tridgwell for forcing Linus Torvalds into creating git.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#304

Post by makmanalp »

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…

As much as this stuff is nuts to think of today and there's tons to hate, I am kinda nostalgic for some aspects of my experience of working at a place where software is maybe needed and/or valued but isn't a core competency. Or maybe a time when software was a new fangled thing that hadn't fully been integrated into corporate structure yet:

- No one having any preconception of how you're /supposed to/ do things or whether you'd even be the type of person to know, so you just kinda figure it out yourself. You spend a lot of time on reading and learning skills. Version control? Wow, cool, what's git, let's try that! A new graphing library? Let's give that a shot, maybe it'll make things easier! You want XYZ? Let me go read about that for a day.

- No one having any idea what's even possible: being treated like a wizard for introducing the tiniest piece of automation or improvement that makes someone's day easier or doing something they never thought was possible. Lots of appreciation and excitement for showing and teaching people new things (... and I know this is somewhat selfish and ego driven, but who doesn't like being appreciated?)

- Similarly people having no idea how long those things should take which, tbh, can be a nightmare if you're not trusted and respected enough to be consulted but also great if people believe you when you say it's gonna take 3 months.

- Beyond the basics just being mostly kinda left alone to do your job however: no standups or tickets or the 30 other kinds of daily (micro)management that is probably necessary but ends up feeling tiresome and stifling at an individual level

- Not being part of software company "culture": no performance review driven development and promo packet madness, no weird rating and ranking systems, no OGPs or KPIs. No ladder. Your bosses think you did what was required of you, so then you're good, and if it's a good year you get a raise, and that's that. I do recognize that with a bad boss this can be a terrible and unfair spot to be in - but again, subjectively with a decent enough boss it felt like a lot less weight on my shoulders at the time.

- No hacker ninja pirate segway mini quadcopter you're the smartest people in the world and we're the best company to work for sort of b.s.

- Socializing with people who are good at and love to talk about stuff other than software

Reading over that, I'm thinking maybe I lucked out a lot and that wasn't most people's experience from that era. And there's some level of rose tinted glasses going on. And/or maybe my years in the rat race are starting to show :-)

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#305

Post by chris_wot »

rblatz wrote: post #249
llmblockchain wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been that person a few times. 1. The only developer on the team with Github and put forward the idea of the company not hosting their own source code with TFS. 2. The only developer using branches with git when the co-founder asked (demanded) everyone to only use master. The list goes on!

There are advantages to trunk based development, not exactly only using master, but close enough that you could probably spin it to comply.

What would stop someone creating a local fork in git, then do a merge fast-forward to the trunk and then push their commits and not the fork?

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#306

Post by epolanski »

Waterluvian wrote: post #223
llmblockchain wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I've worked with a consultancy that prouded itself by exclusively hiring top engineers from top universities and I swear, I can put my hand in boiling hot oil and tell you, they were some of the worst coders I've ever seen, I have no doubts I've met way more brilliant people coming from boot camps.

The fact that people study for exams has absolutely no correlation with how much they will remember or care for what they studied, none.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#307

Post by throwaway93982 »

crngefest wrote: post #264
throwaway93982 wrote: post #165

When it comes to building things, the outcome is dictated by the constraints. But not the way most people realize. Constraints affect outcomes in (at least) three ways: - by absolute limitation (you cannot violate these) - by path of least resistance (the constraint makes X easier) - by strategy (creative use of knowledge & skills leads to novel solutions) --- There is an injured person on top of a mountain, and they…

So to summarise: „It depends“

Well, no... the summary is, you have to think hard in order to use your constraints as effectively as possible or the outcome will suck.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#308

Post by jsmeaton »

chris_wot wrote: post #303
bsder wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git is not a natural development at all. Obviously, it is a standard right now. Git is actually an unnatural development. Its UI is atrocious. And it worked like crap on Windows for forever. Over time, I taught non-computer people who used Windows all of CVS, Subversion, and Mercurial. They got each one and why things were better. The first time they had to recover something, they really got it. Source control got…

git didn't win because of GitHub. Sure, GitHub helped a lot. But actually, it's because its a DVCS, and it does branching and merging way better than anything I've seen so far. You can thank BitKeeper for all of this, and Andrew Tridgwell for forcing Linus Torvalds into creating git.

You don’t think if the company behind GitHub went all-in on mercurial that might have emerged as the winner? There were plenty of companies using either. Git wasn’t the only distributed game in town. I definitely think GitHub had a lot to do with it.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#309

Post by jsonis »

Izkata wrote: post #150
PreInternet01 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my experience dabbling in json fields for CRUD apps has been mostly trouble stemming from the lack of typechecks Well, you move the type checks from the database to the app, effectively, which is not a new idea by any means (and a bad idea in many cases), but with JSON, it can actually work out nicely-ish, as long as there are no significant relationships between tables. Practical example: I recently wrote my own S…

> Fortunately, my session database is just 'JSON(B) in a single table', so I was able to add those additional fields without the need for any migrations. And SQLite's `json_extract` makes adding indexes after-the-fact super-easy. Our solution for a similar situation involving semi-structured data (in postgres) was to double it up: put all the json we send/receive with a vendor into a json field, then anything we actu…

This is exactly what I've tried (and failed at) doing! Can I ask how you handle normalization from vendor data when it contains relationships and multilevel nesting? How do you know when to create a new child table, and which ones to create, and their relationships etc. I haven't found a good balance yet.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#310

Post by nar001 »

grishka wrote: post #282
bartekpacia wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s even more crazy because Telegram is by far the smoothest messenger app on Android. BTW, would you mind sharing how you got that job?

> BTW, would you mind sharing how you got that job? I started working with Pavel Durov in 2011 on the VKontakte Android app, after winning several of his developer contests, and it all just went from there. I was the last one of the "old" team to transfer to Telegram. My main job was actually the libtgvoip[1] library and its integration into the Android app (the other platforms were done by their corresponding devs).…

Why did the call fail? What failed with your implementation/the code?
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