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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#351

Post by pjmlp »

spion wrote: post #332
real-dino wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used typed languages before (C#), and I've used Javascript for 8 or so year, and yep, I too can't see what the hell Typescript brings. I also used Haxe, which was a similar typed language, that compiles down to Javascript, and writing typed language for an untyped environment was an exercise in frustration. It's almost like the React trend to write CSS in javascript. It separates the end result from the code eve…

TypeScript is a fundamentally different type system to most of the other mainstream languages (similarities exist only in typed racket and clojure's core.typed). The fundamental differences stem from the fact that it tries and succeeds to model almost all existing expressive dynamic JS constructs. The resulting different features include: * structural instead of nominal types (i.e. if it walks like a duck and talks l…

Which means that what looked like a nice WebIDL like in version 1.0 has grown to Haskell level language features by 4.2.

I expect Template TypeScript and Liquid TypeScript are not far off.

My enthusiasm for it has died, and I enjoy just doing a plain old on my own projects.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#352

Post by pjmlp »

austincheney wrote: post #211
BigJono wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, I have about 13 years experience, have been senior in both enterprise, start-ups and everything in-between, and have basically the exact same view about front end dev as your original post. Except I fucking hate using Typescript, and totally wasn't expecting to see you mention you like it, given all the other stuff. IME all the same people that overengineer everything with god awful dependencies are the s…

TypeScript is nice when you are working with data structures because everything can be defined as interfaces, including functions and methods. This allows you to identify errors as you are writing code instead of having to execute it. Of course this only works if you make use of strict type definitions. TypeScript is like steroids in that it only makes you more of what you already are, which could be quite negative.…

AngularJS doesn't do TypeScript, Angular does.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#353

Post by pjmlp »

criddell wrote: post #130
Mikushi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last line of defense against a rogue engineering team is managers who have studied this stuff. If your engineering team is the one pushing in that direction I'd reckon the company was in a bad spot to begin with to have hired that team because it strongly indicates that the management layer (head of tech/CTO) has no technical clue. Hire strong Lead Developers with a proven track record of delivering value to co…

And what about the front end? What's the best, most boring choice there? I was on a project for a bit using React and although it felt like an obvious way to write things, I can't help but feel you can't create something that will last for a decade with it.

Server side rendering with VanilaJS for a some dynamic stuff.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#354

Post by Nextgrid »

aeternum wrote: post #271
tluyben2 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often wonder why investors love paying 5 figure aws bills; even worse, why they consider lower bills or not using 'the cloud' a sign of cto incompetence. Even if the company can run on $500 hosting instead. Must be because it is easy to do DD on: AWS, check, TS (JS is now a reason to not pass VC dd I heard from friends) check , React check, microservices, check, etc.

Not using the cloud has many hidden risks. You need multiple physical locations for reliability, those now need to be staffed. If you instead use cheaper 3rd party hosting companies, you may have hurdles to growth and future migration cost since those companies do not have many of the certifications required. From an investor POV, paying a little extra now is often worth it to reduce risk and remove barriers to explo…

Is that a real problem with a reputable bare-metal hosting provider? I agree that a fly-by-night VPS provider would be a major risk, but OVH for example is a major host in Europe (that successfully hosted websites long before the "cloud" was a thing). They have all the major certifications and have been in the business for two decades now and their uptime is solid.

The only risk I can see is the lack of managed services, but Postgres isn't that hard to manage yourself, and other value-add AWS services can still be used (the cost savings of your baseline load being on bare-metal would most likely still offset the bandwidth costs of moving data between AWS managed services and your bare-metal host).

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#355

Post by roguas »

Nextgrid wrote: post #354
aeternum wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not using the cloud has many hidden risks. You need multiple physical locations for reliability, those now need to be staffed. If you instead use cheaper 3rd party hosting companies, you may have hurdles to growth and future migration cost since those companies do not have many of the certifications required. From an investor POV, paying a little extra now is often worth it to reduce risk and remove barriers to explo…

Is that a real problem with a reputable bare-metal hosting provider? I agree that a fly-by-night VPS provider would be a major risk, but OVH for example is a major host in Europe (that successfully hosted websites long before the "cloud" was a thing). They have all the major certifications and have been in the business for two decades now and their uptime is solid. The only risk I can see is the lack of managed servi…

Sure cherrypicking postgres since it has more experience as "on-prem". Try and replicate s3 type of service for me or something like sns - even without fancy stuff.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#356

Post by Bakary »

cema wrote: post #305
postfacto wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the downvotes? This comment’s dead accurate.

I am not sure about the down votes (no reason for them in my opinion) but the casual jab at capitalism looks gratuitous and does not help making the argument seem stronger.

It's not gratuitous if it is central to the argument. The state of affairs they describe is dependent on a virtualized capitalist economy being in place.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#357

Post by Bakary »

msvan wrote: post #83

A lot of new technology eventually becomes boring technology, and this is because of adoption in companies exactly in the way the author is discouraging. When the new becomes boring, everyone gets to reap the benefits of the new tech. The world of software rests on the hard work of others, whether it's open source maintainers spending their free time making libraries for peanuts, or it's people going through the pain…

I don't know if freeloading is the appropriate concept here. A person making open source contributions will be happy to see people use their work. They won't worry about whether the typical user also contributes back. Most people don't have the capacity to make such a contribution.

More broadly, the software industry "freeloads" over the work of all other workers who create a safe environment where food and energy is easily available. But the whole attraction of creating a society is to make life better eventually, otherwise we might as well have never left the savannah.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#358

Post by reasonabl_human »

jjeaff wrote: post #347
blacktriangle wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That...is honestly shocking. Yes the programmer in me cringes at the though of going anywhere near php/mysql, but the business side of me looks at this stack as pragmatic, well documented, well understood, and easy to hire for. On the other side I'm evaluating CL for my next endeavor since I personally find it to be my most productive language, but realistically I'll settle for Clojure and even then I'm worried if th…

He was an ex-googler, so I'm sure only some combination of c, go, and java would have sufficed. Php 7.2+ is great for a lot of saas products and is super fast now. and mysql 8 is rock solid and battle tested in a lot of production systems. Starting over, I would consider PostgreSQL because it has some nifty features. But now that mysql has added json support, I am less inclined and I see a lot of complaints about per…

We use a document based DB to run a massive azure SaaS service offering and it gets the job done quite well, why the hate for non-relational?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#359

Post by reasonabl_human »

rvba wrote: post #325
chrisco255 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Mongo is 10 years old or so at this point. This article was written in 2015 about decisions made years earlier. It's now reached maturity and stability. It's now "boring tech".

Does mongoDB still use math.random to select 10% of errors and only report them, while 90% are ignored? Or did they correct this "behavior"?

Huh? That sounds like crazy talk..

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#360

Post by reasonabl_human »

blackrock wrote: post #293
vvanders wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really common pattern in gamedev too. Median career is something like ~3 years so those that stick around are okay with the crunch and other shitty parts of the industry. Combine that with gatekeeping/I did my time you have to do yours and not much has changed there over the years.

What’s the pay like for senior games engineers?

levels.fyi
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