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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#431

Post by pasc1878 »

wink wrote: post #429
cubano wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't believe the amount of crap I take whenever I introduce very basic version control at the various 3 to 6 man shops I find work at these days. I'm 100% sure that once I left that the devs went back to remote server crash and burn FTP development...they couldn't be bothered with the "hassle" and unneeded headaches of git.

This could have been written and 2014 and 2004 (hi, it's me). There will always be people who don't use it and others who won't remember a time when they hadn't used it :P

Add 1984 to that list of dates. We used PVCS on MSDOS

By 1994 I had moved to other companies and a NeXT equivalent to svn with a good GUI - and then ClearCase.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#432

Post by grishka »

danogentili wrote: post #422
grishka wrote: post #237

The worst codebase I've ever worked on was the Telegram client for Android. I mean just look at this file, it's so huge GitHub gives up rendering it: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/master/TMessagesProj/... Or this one, it implements EVERYTHING for rendering and interacting with a message in a single class, all non-service message types, all drawn manually on a canvas "for performance", and all input processed…

This dude has absolutely no right to say anything about the quality of the source code of the android app, because: 1) His libtgvoip code, previously used for audio calls, is the worst code I have ever had the displesaure of touching, it caused all kinds of issues ranging from instability to segfaults, and thankfully it was completely replaced by webrtc. 2) The android app is literally the smoothest and most responsi…

1) Which version are we talking about? Segfaults were exceedingly rare either way. Especially so when I stopped using raw pointers. But yes, to no one's surprise, early versions were a mess. I can agree with you on that. I can't agree about the same about the last versions though.

It was replaced by WebRTC that would sometimes just suddenly disconnect your calls, right.

> I managed to improve the situation after weeks of refactoring and testing

Did you submit any PRs with your improvements? I used to review and merge those, unlike the Android app devs.

2) It might provide the best UX in the entire universe, but that still doesn't justify having a two-megabyte Java file with over a hundred anonymous inner classes that gaslight you because it's often a `new FrameLayout(activity){` that overrides onLayout and does something completely different. So you see a FrameLayout, you assume it behaves like one, you add views to it, then it doesn't work the way you expect. You start questioning your sanity and only then do you realize that it's one of these stupid things.

Oh and did I mention that even just editing ChatActivity.java is an exercise in frustration? At the time, I had a 2012 MacBook Pro that worked fine for everything I did on it, except editing 2-megabyte Java sources in Android Studio. It would sometimes take a solid 10 seconds for keystrokes to register.

In other words, it might be the best Android app in the world, but it blows up in your face nearly every time you try to add a new feature.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#433

Post by wood_spirit »

Aeolun wrote: post #335
grishka wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).…

> He got furious when he was unable to call some journalist, cursed at me in front of the entire team and sent me a termination notice. Honestly does not sound like a very healthy person to work for anyway.

There are two sides to every story

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#434

Post by crngefest »

throwaway93982 wrote: post #307
crngefest wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to summarise: „It depends“

Well, no... the summary is, you have to think hard in order to use your constraints as effectively as possible or the outcome will suck.

„You have to think hard“ is just „it depends“ worded differently.

If you don’t have to think hard then it also doesn’t depend on the details/circumstances and the outcome will be fine regardless of constraints.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#435

Post by throw0101c »

cubano wrote: post #350
acchow wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git is not a natural development at all. Obviously, it is a standard right now. Most standard tools we use today are not obvious to beginners nor would they be the first thing that beginners reach for. But senior developers can understand the problems that they claim to address, and why they are important and common problems.

You wouldn't believe the amount of crap I take whenever I introduce very basic version control at the various 3 to 6 man shops I find work at these days. I'm 100% sure that once I left that the devs went back to remote server crash and burn FTP development...they couldn't be bothered with the "hassle" and unneeded headaches of git.

> I'm 100% sure that once I left that the devs went back to remote server crash and burn FTP development...they couldn't be bothered with the "hassle" and unneeded headaches of git.

Have you considered introducing Mercurial or even Subversion?

While Git may be a kind of an industry 'standard', if you're starting from zero, some of its concepts may be a bit mind-bending for folks, and it has often been commented that Hg seems to have a more beginner-friendly interface.

And if branching isn't going to be used (a large strength of git/hg), then Subversion may have an even simpler mental model (svn of course does branching, but the others are more optimized for it).

If folks are doing FTP-push deployment, then moving to 'just' SVN-push (commit) deployment can be an improvement.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#436

Post by Aeolun »

wood_spirit wrote: post #433
Aeolun wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He got furious when he was unable to call some journalist, cursed at me in front of the entire team and sent me a termination notice. Honestly does not sound like a very healthy person to work for anyway.

There are two sides to every story

Sure, but I do not feel like it’d really affect the broad strokes of ‘criticized in front of the entire team’.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#437

Post by amszmidt »

gumby wrote: post #211
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.

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…

> none of the GNU codebase was hosted in any sort of revision control.

That isn't true, RCS was already in heavy use by 1991 in the GNU project.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#438

Post by throw0101c »

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.

>> Git[‘s] UI is atrocious. […] Over time, I taught non-computer people who used Windows all of CVS, Subversion, and Mercurial.

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

I would say it is not.

Usability testing is a thing, and products can get better and worse scores when trying to do the same task / reach the same result. I'm not aware of any published studies on the topic, but I would not be surprised if Git got lower scores than Hg on UI/UX, even though they can basically do the same thing (distributed development).

Given the GP trained people on multiple version control systems, including another distributed one (hg), and people mostly had a problem with Git, I would say Git is the problem.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#439

Post by feketegy »

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 that meme when the pizza guy walks into a burning room. Also, this comment is worthy of The Daily WTF.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#440

Post by sebastiennight »

nextaccountic wrote: post #201
PreInternet01 wrote: post #3

> I miss that direct connection. The fast feedback. The lack of making grand plans. There's no date on this article, but it feels "prior to the MongoDB-is-webscale memes" and thus slightly outdated? But, hey, I get where they're coming from. Personally, I used to be very much schema-first, make sure the data makes sense before even thinking about coding. Carefully deciding whether to use an INT data type where a BYTE…

why a separate id and rowid? why not just rowid and data?

"The rowid is implicit and autoassigned, but we want developer-friendly IDs." maybe

But of course, the obvious solution is to have one table with just ROWID and data, and another table with the friendly IDs! If you time the insertions really well, then the ROWIDs in both tables with match and voilà.

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