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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#351

Post by me_again »

bdcravens wrote: post #87

A couple of weeks ago I had a flat on the way to the airport. It was a total blowout, and my car doesn't include a spare. We were already over budget on our trip, so I had the car towed to the closest tire shop and had them put on the cheapest tire that could get me to the airport. I know I'll need to replace other tires, as it's an AWD, and I know it's not a tire I really want. I made a calculated choice to make tha…

A lot of "why TF would anyone you do this?" questions can be answered with variations like this. Borrowing from economics, the discount rate defines how much more valuable something is RIGHT NOW vs at some point in the future. If the system is down and we're losing money by the minute until it is up; if the company will be broke next week unless we make customer X happy; if you have to get to the airport in 2 hours - it is completely rational to make the quick fix. The costs of not doing so outweigh the costs of doing it again properly.

It really becomes a problem when the same short term calculation becomes the standard - you can quickly rack up costs that future you or future company will never pay down.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#352

Post by senorrib »

doublepg23 wrote: post #228
tryauuum wrote: post #47

Would be great to work in such a company as a Linux guru. There are so many entangled services and machines that you feel like an Indiana Jones. You ssh into a machine and feel century-old dust beneath your footsteps. And you never know what will you find. Maybe a service which holds the company together. Maybe a CPU eating hog which didn't do anything useful last 3 years. I don't enjoy writing new code much. But in…

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'm guilty of something like that. At my very first job I used OpenBSD to manage the corporate firewall and proxy. 6 months later quit to attend college, and I have no idea what they did to that box lol.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#353

Post by Mtinie »

samatman wrote: post #325
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…

GitHub won because they built a great product. It was better than all the alternatives and people flocked to it for that reason. Git itself is mediocre, and some other DVCS like Mercurial could have won out, although HgHub really doesn't have the same ring to it. The halo effect from the Linux kernel was also a factor. But the VC cash dump and Microsoft buyout came later, people used GitHub because it was better than…

Mercurial lost because it had the wrong mindshare. It was the Betamax of version control and while it had a lot of positives, it never gained the critical mass to overcome VHS.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#354

Post by ChilledTonic »

Man, I remember my Gilfoyle. We had an employee who would do one off programs for anyone with a use case - but ours wiped his computer before giving it back, so frequently we'd get tickets for software we'd never heard of that was somehow mission critical, and we'd have a few days to spin up a new version on the spot.

Probably some of the most fun I've ever had writing software was making Gilfoyle-2s.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#355

Post by medstrom »

treflop wrote: post #337
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…

I don’t know if I agree that it’s unnatural. It only takes doing index73.php and index_old3.php for a few months and then eventually screwing up (unless you’re perfect) to realize how dumb putting numbers and _old4 at the end of names is. Then at that point, you naturally go look if there’s a better way.

Yes, so you invent CVS, not git.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#356

Post by cruffle_duffle »

treflop wrote: post #337
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…

I don’t know if I agree that it’s unnatural. It only takes doing index73.php and index_old3.php for a few months and then eventually screwing up (unless you’re perfect) to realize how dumb putting numbers and _old4 at the end of names is. Then at that point, you naturally go look if there’s a better way.

> Then at that point, you naturally go look if there’s a better way.

That might be true now but it wasn’t always. Plenty of shops didn’t have any version control at all. And the build was whatever came off your local dev box. And “local dev box” wasn’t even a term…

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#357

Post by cruffle_duffle »

oooyay wrote: post #316
jsmeaton wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sourceforge was complete garbage though. I hated, hated when projects were hosted on it. It was slow, full of ads, impossible to find what you need to download..

GitHub is to sourceforge what Facebook was to MySpace. MySpace was first but it was buggy as hell.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#359

Post by alt187 »

Nexialist wrote: post #31

My worst codebase story: In my first real job, I worked for a company that maintained a large legacy product programmed in a combination of COBOL and Java. In order to work on the Java side of the product, you checked out individual files from source control to work on, which 'locked' the files and prevented other developers from checking out the same files. This functionality was not part of our actual source contro…

That's just maddening enough to start a cult!

The Rube-Goldberg VCS-mutex is hilarious though.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#360

Post by tansan »

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…

These type of stories are a humbling reminder that PMF always beats engineering excellence
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