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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#401

Post by thanksgiving »

dfee wrote: post #120
gnat wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the clarification. Because you said “it took a small team … and then I resigned”, it was unclear that you were part of that small team and instead made it sound like you left because the problem was fixed.

For what it’s worth, it wasn’t unclear when I read it.

I worked at a company recently where I couldn't get a team to do the fairly simple task of cleaning up our git ignore (so we wouldn't have to painstakingly add certain files to the index every time we changed something) so I take it as a massive accomplishment moving to git within two years.

If I know anything about work, I doubt this is all they did for two years. Business doesn't care you have an important project. They will bug you to do other things.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#402

Post by vertis »

tsujamin wrote: post #274
vertis wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of a date column where half the dates were MM/DD/YYYY and the rest DD/MM/YYYY. I did manage to eventually find the point in time when it changed and normalise the database. For those wondering about DD/MM, Australia.

And most countries :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_countr...

Sure, just trying to explain it to US ;)

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#403

Post by hiddew »

prudentpomelo wrote: post #267

It's honestly relieving to read all these stories because I feel like I am in the middle of this right now. Our legacy product is a mishmash of perl and php that was probably started in the early 2000s. Which I wouldn't feel bad about supporting if it wasn't for the new system that has been bolted on top of it. The previous team that started the migration is all gone and now we are halfway between two two systems tha…

Get you, your manager and the CEO in one room, and tell them the facts. Once those are on the table, discuss solutions. Otherwise nobody wins.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#404

Post by duggan »

bsder wrote: post #392
mardifoufs wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By 2012 the writing was already on the wall. This was already well into the first PaaS era with Heroku, Engine Yard, etc. Github was bootstrapped, and using git was a grassroots movement. It was just better than what most people had been using. I never looked back after first switching from SVN to git in 2009.

VCs didn't make git successful, developers did.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#405

Post by duggan »

dfee wrote: post #120
gnat wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the clarification. Because you said “it took a small team … and then I resigned”, it was unclear that you were part of that small team and instead made it sound like you left because the problem was fixed.

For what it’s worth, it wasn’t unclear when I read it.

Yeah, maybe it's one of those reading between the lines things, but I think anyone familiar with burnout would understand.

There are few efforts as truly thankless in many organizations as fixing things.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#406

Post by zenogantner »

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…

At least there were tests ;-).

I am somewhat surprised that a programmer who was unaware of arrays in Perl managed to have tests. But then again, he managed to implement their own version of arrays, maybe he came up with the concept of software testing by himself :-P

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#407

Post by throwaway7e8te »

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…

I worked at a startup where we had to make a lot of compromises. The (non technical) founders could not get enough funding at the beginning, so they had to constantly raise small amounts to survive the next few months.

We had to grow fast and prove that we had a market fit. This meant making compromises, but the technical debt was actually under control. We knew what to improve and how to do it once we had enough resources.

Eventually we proved ourselves and got decent funding and could hire more developers. We were looking forward to improving our system.

Unfortunately the new guys (many fresh out of college, lead by a few "FAANG"-ish seniors) decided that the technical debt was a proof of our incompetence and convinced the leadership that they needed to take over the technical development and rewrite everything. The result was a year where no major features were added and we lost our momentum. The funding dried up and the company had to let go 2/3 of the employees.

The worst part was that the new systems were more complicated to extend due to their clever "scalable design" (distributed monolith) with more micro services than developers. When the rewrite was done and it was time to add the new features, they had lost the trust of the leadership and just threw code at it in desperation to get things done as quickly as possible. I pithy the developers that inherited the result... By that time the rock stars had moved on and are inflicting damage elsewhere after touring conferences where they presented their greatness.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#408

Post by KronisLV »

gumby wrote: post #317
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…

> Git[‘s] UI is atrocious. Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder. Yes, I hate the ‘program command’ syntax (“git add”, “git commit” etc) but I just call git-add etc and for me those commands are pretty clear. But I understand how git works. I imagine most people treat it as a black box and then its behavior probably is rather obscure. I don’t think it was intended for that use case.

> Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder.

I acknowledge that Git is really good on a technical level, but don't like the CLI experience regardless.

Instead, I much prefer to use tools like GitKraken (paid), SourceTree (free, limited platform support), Git Cola (free, lightweight, a bit basic) and know that most of my colleagues just use the Git integration in their IDE of choice.

Working that way, it's a decidedly pleasant experience, not unlike using visual merge tools like Meld, where you can also stage individual lines/code blocks and operate with branches and tags in a very visual and obvious manner.

That said, sometimes the support for Git LFS and things like submodules is all over the place and I've had cases where not adding node_modules or something like that to .gitignore has made the UI unresponsive with how much stuff initially shows up in the working copy, so sometimes you still have to drop down to the CLI and do a fix herer and there.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#409

Post by vintermann »

capitainenemo wrote: post #239
llmblockchain wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been that person a few times. 1. The only developer on the team with Github and put forward the idea of the company not hosting their own source code with TFS. 2. The only developer using branches with git when the co-founder asked (demanded) everyone to only use master. The list goes on!

Given the various accidental leaks dues to people not realising deletion still has a history with git when publishing (not to mention git has no equivalent to mercurial's "censor" operation), or people confusing public and private repos on their github accounts, or even the story just last week here on HN with counterintuitive behaviour of forking in terms of privacy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41060102 ),…

> not to mention git has no equivalent to mercurial's "censor" operation

Haven't followed that for a while, but it used to be the case that it was Mercurial who was principled/fanatic about never rewriting history, ever, while git happily let you mess up with hard deletes.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#410

Post by onion2k »

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…

I don't know how they convinced the users to do this and how they managed with the license but it was done

Enterprise and business users will wade through endless swamps of crap if the software provides enough value. This is a lesson in why "it must be perfect before we release it" is such nonsense - that just says the value your app provides is so low that users barely care and they'll abandon it at the first problem. If that's the case you're not providing anything worth paying for.

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