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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

#331

Post by immibis »

abraxas wrote: post #284
ilyt wrote: post #216

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. The IDE that's written in Java most likely shares nothing with Java ecosystem parts they "hate" (I'm guessing all of the EJB, applets an general 90's Java enterprise stuff). Only irony here is you thinking it is. The 90's Java was a thing to hate. Running fat complex app server…

Ironically, deployment, management, monitoring and security of a single (even clustered) EJB app server was a much more straightforward affair that today's cloud based Rube Goldberg machines that I encouter in practically every "modern" enterprise app.

Yep. For small projects, why is it so hard to have a "deploy to server" button next to "run locally" in my IDE?

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#332

Post by eternalban »

watwut wrote: post #299
ilyt wrote: post #216

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. The IDE that's written in Java most likely shares nothing with Java ecosystem parts they "hate" (I'm guessing all of the EJB, applets an general 90's Java enterprise stuff). Only irony here is you thinking it is. The 90's Java was a thing to hate. Running fat complex app server…

> The IDE that's written in Java most likely shares nothing with Java ecosystem parts they "hate" Most vocal java haters I had met were JavaScript programmers who knew basically nothing about Java. Their hate was purely cultural - they learned on discussion forums that they should hate java. But, they had literally zero knowledge whatsoever.

> purely cultural

oh, I got one to admit he was "intimidated" by Java.

Note: there is a subset of developers who have either hit one of Java/JVMs limitations, or, subscribe as a matter of professional judgement and taste to a school of programming (say FP) that is not a good fit to Java and JVM's orientation (classes, OOP). This subset is an informed subset and their feedback is reasonable and at times has helped Java/JVM move forward.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#333

Post by Tade0 »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #73

I think it's normal. Some systems I've built were quite sticky in the sense that they started as prototypes to be scrapped once we figure out the "real" system architecture, and 8 years later they're still in use and integrated into dozens of business processes, so hard to replace. In general, looking back at old code I wrote it seems my solutions were better when I was more naive / less experienced, as I would often…

I started doing the same thing out of impatience.

Recent example: I have a side project with Typescript on the backend and frontend which also uses an Audio Worklet, so it loads a JS file at runtime to be run in a separate process, isolated from anything else.

I also have a class which I need to use in all three mentioned pieces.

Three years ago I would spend hours trying to figure out how to make this work with the build system so as to not have duplicated code and maybe eventually arrive at a mostly working solution before the e.g. frontend framework maintainers update their build system version which may or may not break something.

This time I just copied the damn file everywhere - the Audio Worklet got the compiled JS output pasted at the start. It's a class, it works and I have maybe one idea what changes I could make there in the future at which point I'm just going to copy everything again.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#334

Post by raverbashing »

pjmlp wrote: post #249
cipher_system wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people who loves JIRA exist for real?

Yes, hello felow developer, every alternative I used in the last 30 years was worse in enterprise integrations.

I agree, it's not that Jira is good but the alternatives were worse

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#335

Post by revelio »

TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #208
revelio wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the usual path of becoming conservative as you grow up. Or phrased another way, becoming normal. The training process humans go through leads to a lot of weird biases, just like how RLHF contributes to models getting bad ideas as well as good. For example, you spend years in school being instructed as efficiently as possible in the one right way to do things that was already discovered. You are only rarely or…

Well, becoming small-c conservative, to a certain extent, is probably fairly normal, though perhaps not inevitable. Capital-C Conservative, not so much: that doesn't come with age, it comes with wealth.

These things are conflated because it usually takes time to accumulate wealth especially if self-made, so older people will tend to both be richer and more small-c conservative.

Also although in the tech industry this link has been broken/inverted, there's usually a correlation between excessive risk taking (i.e. lack of conservatism) and losing all your money. In most sectors of society wealth is built up over time through care and perhaps a bit of moderate risk taking, but not too much.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#337

Post by papito »

Don't get attached to your code, ever. You are not building the Pyramids of Giza, no one will study your work 3000 years from now, or 15, for that matter.

ALL of your code will be dead in a few years. The company goes under, or some punk CTO comes in and commands a "full rewrite ASAP!". Even with normal evolution and refactoring, your original work will be unrecognizable.

Either way, you take experience and friendships from your employment, you are not going to be the Picasso of software engineering.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#338

Post by koheripbal »

ilyt wrote: post #220

That's like calling a chair you built 10 years ago "technical debt" because it can eventually break. No, it's just a fucking product you made. The fact it has to be maintained doesn't mean it is "debt", it's just like any other asset. You don't get to your car and think "that's technical debt". There is nothing technical about it. It's a tool with maintenance needs. The difference is choosing worse now to get it fast…

Well, a more accurate comparison would be if you made a chair 20 years ago, and now no one makes chairs anymore because we have all become robots.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#339

Post by joemasilotti »

> Ruby on Rails is in jeopardy of being added to this list. It has fallen out of favor, and it is tough to find developers for it. What once made it unique is now available in other languages.

I beg to differ. There are 1000+ Rails developers actively looking for work on railsdevs.com

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#340

Post by rco8786 »

Agree with the premise. I currently work with a PM that is simply terrified of introducing any technical debt or "throwaway work". Mind you, he isn't writing or maintaining any of the code himself. It's like pulling teeth getting him to realize that we have to ship some product in order to learn, and some of what we will learn will be what is WRONG with our product and needs to change (aka throwaway work) and that every codebase eventually becomes a legacy codebase (aka technical debt).

I think we've done ourselves a very big disservice as an industry by focusing on this boogeyman.

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