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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#391

Post by bjconlan »

donall wrote: post #192
fouronnes3 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had a visceral reaction to this comment! I once joined a company doing ETL with Apache camel and a half dozen underpowered pet machines. Ingesting their entire dataset and running a suite of NLP models took 3-6 months (estimated; it was so slow nobody ever reprocessed the data to fix bugs or release improvements). I drew up a simple architecture using Kafka, hbase, and MapReduce to implement a lambda architecture.…

It's a shame the CTO was patronizing. I've generally found this to be the attitude of many IT workers in similar positions. I would recommend trying to allocate (work) time to prototype and get important back of the envelope metrics that they think are valuable along with those that you think are valuable.

At least that's what I would ask of anyone who was trying to improve a system (And not just the developers circumstance which I think is perhaps what they CTO is cautious of)

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#392

Post by bsder »

mardifoufs wrote: post #384
bsder wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

You might want to go review your history before accusing someone else of that.

Github took $100 million from VCs in 2012. It then took another $250 million from VCs in 2015. Who the hell else was even within an order of magnitude of that in the same timeframe? Nobody. (Gitlab took almost the same amounts but did so somewhere between 5-8 years later depending upon how you count).

Bitbucket got bought by Atlassian in 2012. Atlassian was bootstrapped until it took $60 million in VC in 2010 and had revenues (not profits) of about $100 million in that time frame. It had nowhere near the resources to be able to drop the equivalent of $350 million on Bitbucket between 2012-2015.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#393

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#394

Post by duskwuff »

kubectl_h wrote: post #340
duskwuff wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of databases include functions for manipulating JSON which can be used for atomic updates. SQLite has JSON_PATCH(), for instance.

Yeah, makes sense. To write safe code though at that point don't you have to enforce rigid schemas? An example would be updating Kubernetes resources, the admission controller will verify the correctness of the change you are trying to make and reject the patch if it's non-comformant. Nested values have... value... in terms of contextualizing and isolating/localizing data leaves but at the end of the day aren't you s…

> To write safe code though at that point don't you have to enforce rigid schemas?

Certainly. But you have to do that with SQLite anyway, because (by default, without strict mode [1] enabled) it won't stop you from putting the wrong type of data into a column.

[1]: https://www.sqlite.org/stricttables.html

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#395

Post by nnurmanov »

I know about the limits on max column number per table. The other day I was thinking about the best table layout for AirTable like systems, I finally decided to use relational tables with json fields. E.g. row is a several fields (id, name, who fields) and one json field where I can put any number of fields. Hopefully, this is going to be the best from both worlds and work good from performance view.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#396

Post by bubblebeard »

llmblockchain wrote: post #175
malux85 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a few of my horror stories where I was a consultant at various companies: 1. Previous consultants left no documentation or anything, and a running Hadoop cluster handling (live!) 300 credit card transactions a second. Management hired 8 junior sysadmins - who were all windows sysadmins, had never used Linux before, and were expected to take over running this Linux cluster immediately. They all looked at me whi…

"Senior" holds no weight with me. I've had plenty dumb founding conversations with "seniors". My favorite was at the company that was self hosting their code. The senior team lead wanted me to help him find a memory leak that plagued the product for months. Customers were told to restart the application every few weeks (this was a C++ application). I sat down with the senior and looked at the code. I spotted the erro…

Titles really mean very little. The company I work at recently hired a DevOps specialist to help configure Docker services and assist with development. He was a decent developer but had no idea how to securely configure server side services. Still stuck with his mess two years later :)

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#397

Post by bubblebeard »

This reminds me of my first internship. The company I worked at backed everything up on CD:s. I was tasked with writing a new service for their intranet, indexing the content of all CD:s, so staff members could lookup which CD contained a certain file.

I wrote a little program to scan the CD:s as I inserted them into my computer, indexing the data into a database I had created, and then labelling the CD.

It wasn’t exactly exciting work but I still miss those days sometimes, everything was new and unexplored.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#398

Post by kuon »

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…

The key here is to put the devs and users together.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#399

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

chatmasta wrote: post #75
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But clearly in retrospect. It sounds like some of the things I was doing in 2009.

It includes a reference to Backbone and Knockout JS, which were released in 2010, so presumably it was around that era. The database, though, was probably much older...

Touche. It was "unnatural things to work around sql server's limitations" that rung a bell.
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