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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#481

Post by zimpenfish »

bdbdhxhdh wrote: post #231
kwhitefoot wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these stories sound a bit far fetched, especially those that involve Unix systems. RCS was released in 1982 and CVS in 1990 so Unix systems have had version control available for over forty years.

There is a lag between availability and mindshare to apply a technology. I myself introduced SVN as versioning solution to a company in 2007, years after git was available I and I was aware of it git simply didn't have the mind share jet, thus I went with what I knew

> I myself introduced SVN as versioning solution to a company in 2007

In 2013, I was tasked with writing wrapper scripts around SVN to make it look like SCCS to avoid confusing the development people who only knew how to use SCCS whilst the company migrated to SVN. Fun but traumatising.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#482

Post by vstollen »

louwrentius wrote: post #450
sebastiennight wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my manager went on a four-week Christmas vacation. Is that kind of stuff common? People checking out on Black Friday and coming back for New Year's?

I bet that’s Europe, it’s not uncommon

Yess, we were the software team for a university library. There wasn't a lot of pressure and people on my team generally had a chill and comfortable life.

However, there wasn't a lot of room for ambition.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#483

Post by [deleted] »

classichasclass wrote: post #324
gumby wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My first job out of college was on a university administrative system where all the source files were managed by RCS. I came on in '97, but the system had been operation in at least that state to 1995. Obnoxiously, the vendor layered some secret sauce on top of it in Makefiles for the actual checkins and outs, so you did something like `make co F=foo.c` which totally messed up filename completion. I had it aliased in…

[deleted]

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#484

Post by EGreg »

There were a couple times I was convinced that basic methods were as good or better than highfalutin ones, or got me thinking about solutions that hew closer to the basic method.

In 2014 or so, someone at a company told me that they just don’t do branches, and merge everything into trunk. I agree that long-lived branches are bad, but no branches at all? Sure enough, this was OK — meaning branches could be kept and synced by a few people outside the main repo, but forks are never pushed to the repo.

Using table columns for data, as long as you’re building for an actual specific business vertical and not just a general-purpose framework.

You never know when you’ll want to put an index on the data, and databases already have built-in mechanisms to select a subset of the fields, etc. You avoid all kinds of joins. If you need to extend the table, just start a new table with the same synthetic ID.

I would say, in tables where you don’t want to even have global locks (eg sharded tables), just don’t have an autoincrementing ID. Instead, try a random ID or a UUID, and insert it, then use it across tables.

In short, what was described here is actually good design.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#485

Post by kelsey98765431 »

Snacklive wrote: post #480

This hits close to home. At my current job we have a similar experience, We are building an Android app and the codebase is probably the same age as me (25yo). It started as a Windows Phone app that was later ported over to Android, you can easily find files and segments of the codebase that were auto generated by some code converter from C# to Java. In the codebase itself you can see the evolution of code styles, ol…

> Windows Phone - Wikipedia > 1 week ago - It was first launched in October 2010 with Windows Phone 7.

25 years ago phones still had cords. Infact, C# itself is only just barely 19 or 20 years old at best. I know I felt like everything that came before me was ancient when I was young, but a decade is a long time in tech so i just felt the need to point out that if you had a codebase for a phone from 25 years ago if it was not written directly in assembly, it would have been running a very slim java version called Java ME (Micro Edition) for feature phones which was all the rage before android, or if you were unlucky you would be dealing with BREW which was a SDK for c/cpp development on feature handsets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Platform,_Micro_Edition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for...

C# Would have been beyond a luxury for a mobile application 25 years ago.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#486

Post by DragonMaus »

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 entirely typical of especially VB scripts. When I was a software engineer for a Fortune-20 company, I spent more time debugging (and trying to normalize, though that met with mixed levels of resistance) VB applets than anything else.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#487

Post by silisili »

medstrom wrote: post #428
silisili wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comparison is pretty harsh and really underemphasizes how awful sourceforge was. Myspace was mostly fine, death by feature creep. Sourceforge was a flaming pile of garbage that was poorly designed, ad laden, AND silently bundled in ad/spyware to normal downloads. A more apt comparison would be comparing Facebook to a hypothetical social media site that when you click on a thumbnail of a user's image, you get a f…

You mean the comparison is too mild? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/harsh

Oh, meant harsh to Myspace, which wasn't that bad really.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#488

Post by fencepost »

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…

Oh dear god no. The solution is not throw VS at it and run from the code, the next step is some combination of excessive logging (which to be fair may resolve the issue all by itself) and/or throwing in a ton of DoEvents because Visual Basic.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#490

Post by fencepost »

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.

I think you misspelled "Visual SourceSafe" - and depending on when this VB was written it might actually predate VSS as a Microsoft product.

Source code management back in the days of VB (long before VB.Net) was not the same as what you see today.

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