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My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

blog.visionarycto.com

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Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#421

Post by replygirl »

jcranmer wrote: post #404
josephg wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. I’ve spent several years writing javascript for a living. You can always tell when code was written by someone who’s arrived fresh from Java or C++. Their code is full of hundreds of lines of useless classes which can often be replaced by a few simple object literals. Unlike class instances, object literals can be easily json stringified and parsed, too! You can torture people who are like this in code review: “…

> I want to link it to whoever insisted on adding a useless TextDecoder class in javascript that you have to instantiate, instead of just calling textDecode(…, “utf8”) using a global function like the rest of the standard library. I for one would rather punch the person who proposes such a global function as the only mechanism for conversion, because charset conversion is a reasonable thing to do on chunked partial i…

This is what GP is talking about. Chunking can be done cleanly with very few internal functions (and without changing the call signature, if you want), but you're implying it must be a class and already thinking about hypothetical hacks

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#422

Post by mark_l_watson »

I don’t disagree with the author, but I don’t worry much about old tech that is no longer useful.

I have worked in the field of AI for 40 years, and we have had a huge trash heap of technologies that ended up being useless except for lessons learned from failure.

I have always been motivated to work for just two reasons: supporting myself and my family, and learning and using new tech. The great fun is in learning new things. That said, sometimes there is good short term work supporting old tech that companies still want to use.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#424

Post by klibertp »

polotics wrote: post #319
josephg wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. I’ve spent several years writing javascript for a living. You can always tell when code was written by someone who’s arrived fresh from Java or C++. Their code is full of hundreds of lines of useless classes which can often be replaced by a few simple object literals. Unlike class instances, object literals can be easily json stringified and parsed, too! You can torture people who are like this in code review: “…

Word! I just left a Java-only shop for pythonic pastures and the culture is so much more pragmatic and to-the-point. Hopefully soon enough ML models can be fed millions of line of code and produce the functionally equivalent thousands...

They're trained on billions of lines of code - most of them are not very good. I'm using Copilot, and the docstring/docs it suggests are so bad it hurts. If left alone, Copilot would happily generate those thousands of lines instead of helping reduce them to hundreds. It's still useful if given enough direction, but you need to be really careful not to overuse it or risk getting mistaken for a junior straight out of a bootcamp during code review :)

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#425

Post by fatnoah »

cipher_system wrote: post #201
Hamuko wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are the people who belong to "I hate Java" and "I love Jira" sets? I'd love to see that Venn diagram.

Do people who loves JIRA exist for real?

> Do people who loves JIRA exist for real?

I wouldn't say that I love JIRA, but every time I work at a company that doesn't use it, the alternative in place always feels much worse.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#426

Post by carapace »

I used to feel bad about how much of my career was waste. Then one day I met a retired hardware engineer, a old hand who had rubbed shoulders with Shockley, who told me that 80% of the projects he worked on never even made it to production. Four-fifths of his hardware career was waste!

If it's that bad in hardware land I don't feel so bad about this virtual detritus we software people spew. At least it's cheap, eh?

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#427

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

flippinburgers wrote: post #347
lastangryman wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as I tend to over-engineer systems and constantly doubt / second-guess my technical decisions I find this as well. I also think that there is a sub-conscious fear as you become more senior that you need to justify that with more elaborate/complex solutions. In my experience there are also a lot of people in software who never come out of the other side of that view and constantly equate "complex" with "good". Being…

I don't know what this means about my personal (in-)ability but I've been developing for years (15+) and I feel like all of the other developers I have to deal with are constantly turning to weird, convoluted solutions to problems. I have also never been able to get past the first step in the google interview process so I have this deep, frustrated insecurity. And people constantly like to point out how simple my stu…

You probably need to study the Complex, get to know it really well, almost, but not entirely, embrace it, and only then ditch it in favor of Simple.

I mean, it could just be that your simple solutions have been missing something, maybe something crucial, or you lacked the understanding of the mindset of people loving their complex stuff, which presented a communication barrier.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#428

Post by piokoch »

jen20 wrote: post #277
ilyt wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles. The IDE that's written in Java most likely shares nothing with Java ecosystem parts they "hate" (I'm guessing all of the EJB, applets an general 90's Java enterprise stuff). Only irony here is you thinking it is. The 90's Java was a thing to hate. Running fat complex app server…

I assure you code as XML has not disappeared from enterprise Java.

It has not disappeared from enterprise and this has nothing to do with Java. XML is still very good as a document format, with powerful validation capabilities (XSD) and powerful language to do transformation of documents (XSLT), searching documents (XPath). It is still used for a reason.

In addition there are standard ways of encrypting/signing XML documents.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#429

Post by kiliantics »

MartinMcGirk wrote: post #18

I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…

To your point about buildings, I wish we considered the "technical debt" of our society's built infrastructure more. It seems we went very wrong with this habit of building and rebuilding on such short cycles, especially on large projects that have much longer lasting consequences on the more important infrastructure of our natural ecosystems. All that carbon burned to extract, produce, and transport building materials. All those sprawling roadways built over habitats and forcing people into unsustainable patterns of living, burning more carbon in their day to day to get around. This debt needs to be measured and it needs to be addressed with high priority.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#430

Post by jayd16 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #153

> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated. My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn . And, geez, is the graveyard huge. > Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the c…

> And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.

Didn't they also make Kotlin so they could use the JVM without Java?

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