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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#491

Post by jacobyoder »

noisy_boy wrote: post #474
jacobyoder wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when the column was added, they just defaulted it all to USD. So and USD value could be CAD — you "just" needed to parse the address column to find out. I bet no one even considered the idea that someone in Canada might pay in USD dollars. I had to... discuss... with someone the possibility that if we were recording money received from a bank, we might do well to record the currency type as well, because... ban…

For such told-you-so scenarios, when there is a disagreement and you are pretty sure you are correct, raise a ticket, describe the issue and close it "As Designed" with comment detailing the discussion (including the overruling party). Next time there is a ticket to do this with "high priority", tell them "we already have a ticket for this, let me reopen it" for everyone to see... risky though, saving face/burning br…

Agreed. I usually document the disagreement somewhere - tickets, or email thread at very least.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#492

Post by necovek »

tomjen3 wrote: post #379
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it astonishingly? Git is not a natural development at all. Obviously, it is a standard right now. But I as a hobby coder at my teens I started out with FileZilla and copying over index2.php, index3.php, index_final.php, index_final_2.php and all of it worked well enough when at that point. I took a little break from that hobby, and it still took me a lot of time to build intuition around Git when I started out…

Git is pretty unnatural, but CVS? That is much closer to the "copy a shared file back and forth between people", except with nice things such as "keep track of who is editing what", "know what the latest edition is", and "keep track of the history". That said, if I was going to start out teaching someone coding today, version control would be timestamped .zip files.

Ouch, please don't. Anything else like bzr or hg or svn will be easier to grasp than git, can work locally too (IIRC for Subversion) and not much harder than zip files — don't get them used to the wrong mental model and bad habits.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#493

Post by collinmanderson »

qup wrote: post #477
collinmanderson wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had a website taken down by (pretty sure) a person setting something on their F5 key.

Let's hear it!

The symptom was the website wasn’t loading, just spinning forever.

Looking at the http logs, around 5pm an ip address started spamming a whole bunch of requests to the same url. The same ip was doing pretty normal stuff on the website about an hour earlier.

My theory is holding down F5 key would cause the page to reload about 30 times a second. The website was not able to handle that many requests per second and it effectively became a denial of service attack.

This was around 2007-2010 and I think by now browsers have stopped repeating a reload if the F5 key is held down.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#494

Post by MBCook »

yyyfb wrote: post #472
MBCook wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never had to deal with “we don’t use source control”, luckily. One company I joined was cleaning up the last vestiges of “customize it for every customer by letting people edit their copy on server,” which predictably turned into a mess. They were all very small customizations to styles or images but enough to make upgrades a total mess. I did work at a company where despite having full source control they didn’t a…

That's not an exception, I think? Most online service businesses that I've worked with wouldn't be able to run their operations from a "cold start". That takes a lot of effort to engineer and in practice it doesn't happen enough, so that's a risk that most are willing to run with.

Really? Everywhere else I’ve worked has been able to.

I’m not saying all the data in the database. Pretend your DB is fine or you have a full up to date backup. I know losing that KILLS businesses. But in my example just the web server immolated and the backup tapes sitting next to it melted.

Can you set up a new web server?

As a Java developer it’s usually install OS, add Apache + Tomcat, set a few basic config parameters, copy WARs.

PHP or Python is even easier.

They didn’t know they could successfully do that.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#495

Post by foundthebeef »

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.

I'm consistently baffled by the people who don't understand how git works who then complain that it's hard. Yes, of course something you don't know is hard. Version control is a hard problem; I'm not sure why so many expect it to be unicorns and rainbows.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#496

Post by foundthebeef »

bsder wrote: post #277
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it astonishingly? Git is not a natural development at all. Obviously, it is a standard right now. But I as a hobby coder at my teens I started out with FileZilla and copying over index2.php, index3.php, index_final.php, index_final_2.php and all of it worked well enough when at that point. I took a little break from that hobby, and it still took me a lot of time to build intuition around Git when I started out…

> 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 isn't foisted on anyone, although I will acknowledge that if you're working anywhere remotely web-y, you'll be required to use it.

But the vast majority of people I personally see who complain about git simply don't know how to use it, and apparently don't care to learn. They say it's hard, and then they joke about never learning more than three git commands. Can't we do better? Is that where the bar is?

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#497

Post by foundthebeef »

treflop wrote: post #334
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…

GitHub won because it was good. SourceForge had a messy interface and frankly I hated it. Google Code was like frozen in time, like most Google projects. Microsoft’s thing — I don’t even remember the name — felt half assed and like they were going to abandon it… and they abandoned it. There were also others… none of which I even think were serious enough. Also Git won because SVN and CVS were centralized VCSes and yo…

GitHub won because it was free.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#498

Post by foundthebeef »

hinkley wrote: post #96
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…

We should use the Antarctic highlands as a prison colony for people found guilty of writing Stringly Typed Code. Siberia isn’t awful enough for them. I thought people who stuffed multiple independent values into a single database column were the worst and then I saw what people can accomplish without even touching a database.

People balk at the idea of licensure, but the bar is so low that all you have to do is ask "what is an array?", and you'll filter out vast swaths of people like this.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#499

Post by foundthebeef »

dmd wrote: post #97
hinkley wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should use the Antarctic highlands as a prison colony for people found guilty of writing Stringly Typed Code. Siberia isn’t awful enough for them. I thought people who stuffed multiple independent values into a single database column were the worst and then I saw what people can accomplish without even touching a database.

Ha - we did that too at BMS. We were paying Oracle by the column or something like that, so people would shove entire CSV rows into a single value (because corporate said everything HAD to be in Oracle) and then parse them application-side.

Ah yes, like calling collect and telling them your name is "mompickmeupfromthemoviesnowbye".

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#500

Post by foundthebeef »

jahewson wrote: post #377
dmd wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha - we did that too at BMS. We were paying Oracle by the column or something like that, so people would shove entire CSV rows into a single value (because corporate said everything HAD to be in Oracle) and then parse them application-side.

Sounds like they charged by the column but you actually paid with your souls.

Needful Databases
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