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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#371

Post by rblatz »

failbuffer wrote: post #220
agentultra wrote: post #132

The ending is pure gold. Some of the best times in my career were working on a codebase for an application serving folks I knew on a first name basis and had had lunch with. I could talk through pain points they were having, we’d come up with a solution together, I’d hack up a quick prototype and launch it just to them to try out. We’d tweak it over a couple of weeks and when it was good I’d launch it to all customer…

... and get them talking directly to the user. I feel that's where the real magic happens.

When you actually understand the problem you are solving, and the users you solve it for you start to care about a solution and not just the technology.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#372

Post by jahewson »

zarathustreal wrote: post #363
tansan wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well that depends entirely on what you consider to be the goal - as a software engineer, your role is entirely concerned with engineering excellence. As a member of a team, especially a team of extremely highly paid and highly educated individuals, it is your duty to spend your time (and thus, the company’s resources) efficiently by doing what you’re educated, qualified, and hired to do.

Engineering excellence is a means to an end. Great engineers solve problems - sometimes by writing software.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#373

Post by noisy_boy »

20after4 wrote: post #315
xp84 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thats a name I haven't heard for a while - I was obsessed with scouring deviantart for cool wallpapers during my very early Linux days of desktop tinkering (mostly fluxbox and gkrellm tweaking).

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#374

Post by jahewson »

makmanalp wrote: post #304
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 wh…

You’ve got a point! There was a special moment there for a while. Your description perfectly captures my experience interning on a small IT team around 2000. This was in England so the secretaries would snigger whenever I said “debugger”. The downside was that the management had absolutely no clue about software as they’d jumped from some other career and the field was advancing quickly.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#375

Post by eastbound »

ufmace wrote: post #139
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…

I think a lot of people who've only learned programming in the last 10 years or so don't realize that Git, and even more so the large-scale popularity of Git, is actually pretty new. A lot of programming happened before Git was created, and before it became mature and popular enough to be the default for everyone. Many of these earlier systems sound terrible and hacky to us, but they were the best that was available…

I’ve used Clearcasse in 2006 and it had all the branches that we needed. We didn’t use locks because that was annoying. It was at Deutsche Bank and we were 200.

When I moved to SVN, it was a regression. I really don’t understand why people describe SVN as cutting-edge (and why people didn’t like Clear Case).

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#376

Post by camilla4151 »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #130
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…

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.

[dead]

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#377

Post by jahewson »

dmd wrote: post #97
hinkley wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should use the Antarctic highlands as a prison colony for people found guilty of writing Stringly Typed Code. Siberia isn’t awful enough for them. I thought people who stuffed multiple independent values into a single database column were the worst and then I saw what people can accomplish without even touching a database.

Ha - we did that too at BMS. We were paying Oracle by the column or something like that, so people would shove entire CSV rows into a single value (because corporate said everything HAD to be in Oracle) and then parse them application-side.

Sounds like they charged by the column but you actually paid with your souls.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#378

Post by jahewson »

arghnoname wrote: post #279
dmd wrote: post #77

Probably some of the worst code I ever worked on was a 12k+ line single file Perl script for dealing with Human Genome Project data, at Bristol-Myers Squibb, in the late 1990s. The primary author of it didn't know about arrays. I'm not sure if he didn't know about them being something that had already been invented, or whether he just didn't know Perl supported them, but either way, he reimplemented them himself on t…

If I were being charitable (sometimes I try), I'd guess he was concerned that an array of scalars is going to have a high per scalar size overhead and perhaps worse cache locality, whereas the non-unicode perl string implementation at the time probably just stored the string as a large char* with a length prefix. In a similar vein, an alternate explanation may just be that a lot of bioinformatics algorithms are descr…

I’ve seen this “misunderstood genius” argument so many times I think there needs to be a law to refute it:

Never attribute to competence that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#379

Post by tomjen3 »

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…

Git is pretty unnatural, but CVS? That is much closer to the "copy a shared file back and forth between people", except with nice things such as "keep track of who is editing what", "know what the latest edition is", and "keep track of the history".

That said, if I was going to start out teaching someone coding today, version control would be timestamped .zip files.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#380

Post by mardifoufs »

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…

Well yeah for hobby use you're right that it is "normal" that it took a long time to get there. But professional use is completely different. That's the part they are referring to I'd say.
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