Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 588 posts

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#311

Post by 20after4 »

When I was still in college studying Computer Science (~2001) I got a part time job at a Medical Claims clearing house doing VB and Java programming. My task was to re-write in Java the ancient and archaic system which would read in medical claims that were uploaded by providers and then translate them into the one of several formats, depending on which insurance provider we were sending them to. The inputs were big batches of data in one of two formats, "ASC X12"¹ or "NSF"² and the outputs were some ideocyncratic version of those two, or a 3rd option which was just ascii text, layed out (monospace) such that it would line up when you dump the file directly to a printer loaded with the pre-printed UB-92³ forms.

None of this is particularly interesting, unless you have a fascination with archaic file formats and/or an interest in historical and highly idiosyncratic government bureaucracy.

The really interesting (horrifying) thing about the job, though, was the state of the VB6 code which I was asked to translate into well structured and performant Java. There were some really hilarious and nightmare inducing subroutines like "BunchOfIfs" and "BigSelect", each of these monsters were several thousand lines long and consisted of exactly what you'd expect. Huge branching structures with absolutely no reasonable organization or design. I'm not even exaggerating to say it was just the accumulated cruft of 10 years of dirty hacks tacked on by the cheapest coders they could find where the only standards were if it works it ships. Literally the worst procedural code you can imagine with zero factorization, modularization, plenty of duplicated code copied and pasted then modified to do something slightly different than the 3 other versions of similar code elsewhere in the project.

Somehow, after a year of part-time work (20 hours a week, between classes) I managed to produce a working system to translate claims from any one of the weird formats into any other one of the weird formats, including 5 or 6 variants of said formats, each one which violated the spec in a unique way in order to satisfy the strange requirements of some particular insurance company. The Java version was less than 10% the size (lines of code) of the old system, ran 30x faster and produced correct output.

Still to this day it's objectively the most difficult, painstaking, excruciating, but also probably the best, most impressive work I've done. And it's the least I've ever been paid for writing code.

Oh and I forgot to mention, nothing was in source control and there were several variants of the codebase that had been modified slightly to do a similar but different task and then just continued to drift away from the codebase it was copied from.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASC_X12 2. https://manuals.momed.com/edb_pdf/NSF%20(National%20Standard... 3. https://owcprx.dol.gov/static/UB-92.pdf

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#312

Post by odyssey7 »

It’s a cute story, it made me laugh.

If this story reminds you of the codebase you work on, don’t let its romanticism deceive you into thinking that suffering is somehow actually good.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#313

Post by gumby »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #271
gumby wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astonishingly, It took a long time for revision control to become widespread. Around 1991 when Cygnus had 6-7 employees and was based in the apartment complex where I lived, none of the GNU codebase was hosted in any sort of revision control. Everything was FTPed around as obscurely named tarballs. We had gathered something like 27 different forks of gdb floating around the net, for example. This was back when forkin…

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…

> Why is it astonishingly?

Git is still a baby as these things go. Software version control systems go back to the early 1960s and descended from manual processes used to manage documents in large organizations, blueprints, and such from the early 20th century. Don’t imagine the Manhattan Project functioned by just passing around bundles of paper! There were staffs of people whose job was to manage document control! And I don’t mean “control” in the sense of secrecy, but making sure everybody was on the the same revision at the same time.

And for a field so steeped in building its own tools and automating human effort in development it is indeed astonishing revision control took so long to be accepted.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#314

Post by gumby »

jimbokun wrote: post #241
gumby wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astonishingly, It took a long time for revision control to become widespread. Around 1991 when Cygnus had 6-7 employees and was based in the apartment complex where I lived, none of the GNU codebase was hosted in any sort of revision control. Everything was FTPed around as obscurely named tarballs. We had gathered something like 27 different forks of gdb floating around the net, for example. This was back when forkin…

> Pixley agreed to all of that and then ignored all of it completely. Hahaha that's brilliant, and an important lesson for junior developers. Sometimes this is the best way forward. High risk of course. But the reward can be great.

We had the right corporate culture to make this attitude successful. By the time we were a couple of hundred people, though, and had hired some MBAs, that culture was mostly gone.

It requires a level of trust and a level of performance, that I now believe doesn’t scale. Note that we had only a single junior developer, an intern, who wrote our bug tracking system but didn’t otherwise interact with the code base. The rest of the team consisted entirely of experienced senior developers, including management. I think at up to about 25 employees, the shortest working experience on the team (apart from the intern) might have been 10 years of shipping code.

But I really respect Rich for taking this approach which is why I referred to him by name.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#315

Post by 20after4 »

xp84 wrote: post #290
doublepg23 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I started my recent job the team kept referring to a box running "weird linux". After getting on-boarded and accessing the box it turned out to be running a very old version of OpenBSD. To this day I'm curious who had the wherewithall to install OpenBSD in prod but was seemingly ignorant of the 1yr support cycle.

I started reading and was hoping someone had installed one of the Linux distros that were popular at the turn of the millennium, like Mandrake, Slackware, etc. and it was still trucking along 25 years later.

In 2010 or 2011, deviantArt was running on several hundred slackware servers. One of my projects at that job was converting everything to run on Debian with config management in Puppet to replace all of the old manually configured services.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#316

Post by oooyay »

jsmeaton wrote: post #308
chris_wot wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Before there was GitHub there was Sourceforge. Sourceforge supported several different protocols and git still won.

Gits internals can be confusing at first, but once you understand them there's really nothing you can't do. Being distributed by design also helps.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#317

Post by gumby »

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[‘s] UI is atrocious.

Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder. Yes, I hate the ‘program command’ syntax (“git add”, “git commit” etc) but I just call git-add etc and for me those commands are pretty clear.

But I understand how git works. I imagine most people treat it as a black box and then its behavior probably is rather obscure. I don’t think it was intended for that use case.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#318

Post by grishka »

nar001 wrote: post #310
grishka wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

We'll never know. There are many things that could go wrong because VoIP over the public internet is inherently fragile. When I asked for logs so I could look into it, I got cursed at once again.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#319

Post by heraldgeezer »

grishka wrote: post #237

The worst codebase I've ever worked on was the Telegram client for Android. I mean just look at this file, it's so huge GitHub gives up rendering it: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/master/TMessagesProj/... Or this one, it implements EVERYTHING for rendering and interacting with a message in a single class, all non-service message types, all drawn manually on a canvas "for performance", and all input processed…

Well, Telegram is faster/smoother than FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord (dog slow) etc...

So it is not only working but working well.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#320

Post by cyanydeez »

blacklight wrote: post #205
fouronnes3 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazing. I can so well imagine a bright young hire joining that team, helpfully offering to "setup this thing called git" only to be laughed out of the meeting by all the "senior" staff.

Been there. There was this old fashioned developer in one of the companies I worked for a decade ago who never understood nor embraced version control (we were talking of SVN at the time, not even git). Luckily that wasn't the case for all the others developers in the company. But when it came to the projects he owned, I witnessed several scenes along the lines of "hey, customer X has an issue with your component Y,…

Perhaps he was more concerned with job control, and saw centralized code as a detriment to his job security
Post reply on HN