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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#381

Post by disqard »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #254
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…

> with some still having bugs fixed years before for others Hopefully they won't discover at some point that customers were in fact depending on those bugs. That's poison for the programmer's soul.

Yup! Hyrum's Law :)

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#382

Post by jahewson »

cmpalmer52 wrote: post #301

I once had a project to turn a customer’s Excel VBA application into a real application (I used ASP.Net). He had been hacking on this Excel spreadsheet for like 15 years. Once I printed the VBA code because it was hard to navigate and it was like 250+ pages printed out rather compactly. The worse part wasn’t the code itself (although it was bad), but the fact that there was so much abandoned paths in it and there wou…

By the end of the first sentence I thought “that sounds like engineering” (the real kind). I know people still dealing with this kind of thing!

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#383

Post by MikePlacid »

Oh, the shipping! Now, from the customer’s point of view.

My youngest worked in a furniture chain over the summer. And they got sent a big, heavy furniture set from the central warehouse, which the store actually didn't want. So, they sent it back. The problem was that the system didn't allow them to say: please, don't send this again. And the non-natural intelligence at the central base decided to send this set again. When my youngest started working - they were loading this set back for the seventh time.

Why 'loading'? Because no one could find a way in the program to send this ill-fated set back on the same truck that brought it. No one, except my youngest, that is. He managed to find the combination of keys and checkboxes that allowed them not to unload the unwanted set and ship it back on the same truck - and he immediately got a raise.

I suspect the set is still traveling. But now they only load-unload it at the central warehouse.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#384

Post by mardifoufs »

bsder wrote: post #367
oooyay wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wasn't the only offering at the time. Lots of companies were doing Git and Mercurial "forges" at the time. Many of them were better than Github. Everything was evolving nicely (including Git and Github) until Github used VC money to offer everything for free to blow everybody out in order to lock people into their product (for example--export of anything other than code is still hit or miss on Github). At…

That's such a weird rewriting of history. I know blaming VC is very fun and all, but Bitbucket, originally centered around mercurial, had just as much resources as GitHub and even more. Tons of early contributors to git and the ecosystem were from google and Microsoft. Microsoft started using and shifting towards gif when GitHub was still a baby, etc.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#385

Post by neontomo »

jimmyhmiller wrote: post #43
Waterluvian wrote: post #2

The first line really hits me hard. There’s something so incredibly freeing about being a kid and doing stuff like coding. There’s simply no expectations. Even the smallest project felt like such an achievement. But now I code professionally and I don’t know how to turn off engineering brain. I don’t know how to be okay doing something poorly, but on my terms.

This is something I've had to train myself to overcome. The first step for me was having a place where I clearly signaled that this wasn't my best work. Where the rules were allowed to be broken. That place is my junk drawer of code[1]. I have a zsh alias `alias changes='git add . && git commit -am "Changes" && git push'` that I use for my commits in the repo. This all may feel silly, but it's what I needed to get ba…

next step: not using git ;-)

i considered a few times to make an alias like this but i feel like git is so precious to get right that i would rather type out each command just to "feel" what i'm doing and be active in it.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#386

Post by wolf550e »

Izkata wrote: post #131
stavros wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all take too much for granted how much git "just works", even when it doesn't.

Even those before git - what they're describing sounds a bit like RCS, the precursor to CVS, which came before SVN. I've never used RCS or CVS myself, but I remember the file locking thing in descriptions of it, and that it was why CVS was named "concurrent" - it fixed that limitation.

VSS6 had file checkout, which IIRC locked the file preventing other devs from editing it. It was popular with Visual C++ 6.0, circa the year 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_SourceSafe

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#387

Post by mardifoufs »

grishka wrote: post #282
bartekpacia wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s even more crazy because Telegram is by far the smoothest messenger app on Android. BTW, would you mind sharing how you got that job?

> 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).…

What was it like to work for telegram/durov? A part from the "getting fired" part that is ;)

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#389

Post by HdS84 »

Uvix wrote: post #368
treflop wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub won because it was good. SourceForge had a messy interface and frankly I hated it. Google Code was like frozen in time, like most Google projects. Microsoft’s thing — I don’t even remember the name — felt half assed and like they were going to abandon it… and they abandoned it. There were also others… none of which I even think were serious enough. Also Git won because SVN and CVS were centralized VCSes and yo…

You either meant Visual SourceSafe or Team Foundation Server for the Microsoft product. SourceSafe did get abandoned... because your source wasn't actually safe in it. Its replacement, Team Foundation Server got rebranded as Azure DevOps; but the product's still around, 19 years later.

Yes, but it's source control shifted to git years ago (I think you can still use TFS, but it's strongly legacy ) and git is mich better than TFS ever was.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#390

Post by HdS84 »

parpfish wrote: post #148
The_Colonel wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this level of dysfunction, installing git won't do anything. You need a holistic change in thinking which starts with convincing people there's a problem.

Yeah, this level of dysfunction takes years to cultivate. You need the “Dead Sea effect” to be in effect long enough that not only have the good people left, but for them to have been gone long enough that people rising into management have never even worked with somebody competent so they don’t know there’s a better way

I am occasionally on firefighting projects for customers. It's super hard to get out of this mess. The code base has gone to shit, customers are often passed enough that they want functioning code NOW, the reaming developers are bottom of the barrel, management is either cause of the problems or has now clue. Getting out of that is difficult especially if management doesn't understand it has to change first.
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