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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

hanselman.com

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Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#51

Post by bdcravens »

fxtentacle wrote: post #31

I feel like the article misses out on two crucial truths: 1. Most of the new tools are pure nightmare to maintain. RoR has breaking API changes often enough that you need multiple people to maintain a large codebase, whereas in PHP you'd only need one person because things don't magically break that often. And MongoDB is so convoluted and complicated that almost nobody can deploy it correctly. And then there's "new"…

Rails has a very predictable cadence (once a year) and a published support policy.

https://guides.rubyonrails.org/maintenance_policy.html

> RoR has breaking API changes often enough ... magically break that often

According to the support policy, nothing magic about those breaking changes: "Breaking changes are paired with deprecation notices in the previous minor or major release."

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#52

Post by bdcravens »

polskibus wrote: post #4

I wonder if Scott Hanselman ever had to maintain large system while having limited resources to do so. Churn is bad for most, apart from companies who must sell new things to keep on going, like software companies. Moving fast and breaking things is great when you don't have to consider churn cost. Calling the anti-churn crowd "dark matter developers" seems at least a bit derogatory.

I know Scott meant nothing derogatory by it. "Dark matter developers" refers to the developers you don't see. If someone is offended by that, I think it's a sign that they desperately wish they could be at the leading edge, but aren't allowed to. There's a ton of developers in the industry who have a different set of values than that.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#53

Post by caymanjim »

I keep up with modern tech. I regularly learn new languages and frameworks. I lead agile dev teams. I work as a consultant modernizing devops and moving to cloud deployments. I write real software for real businesses doing real things.

I don't blog. I don't go to conferences. I don't go to hackathons. I don't have any meaningful presence on GitHub. Hacker News is about the only place I have even the slightest footprint, and most of what I talk about here has nothing to do with my career as a software engineer.

So what? The implication in this article is that if you're not out there trying to be visible, you must be some crusty old COBOL developer locked in the basement.

In my experience, the people who are the loudest are rarely the people who are doing the most. If you spend all your time trying to prove to strangers that you're hip to the latest trends, just how much time are you spending doing anything of actual value? Not everyone who has a big public presence is actually doing anything. Most of the discussions online and presentations at conferences are nothing new. Most of it is self-promotion. When I see people get all excited about tech, it's usually because it's new to them, not because it's a new idea.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#54

Post by rowanG077 »

cblum wrote: post #48
sfkdjf9j3j wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that still true if you don't count Wordpress sites?

Why would you not count those?

Because they are not really "code". Just like I don't consider someone making cookies from ready cookie dough a baker.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#55

Post by bdcravens »

onion2k wrote: post #8

Scott talks about how devs don't do anything to be seen yet if you look at his twitter stream it's mostly just him tweeting his own posts and retweeting other "famous" developers. He, and the majority or other very visible people in the community, gatekeep the blogosphere by failing to help anyone else break in (not necessarily consciously of course; they may just never see the less famous devs posts). Scott could be…

For dark matter developers, there is no "gatekeeper" since there's no gate they want to cross: those developers aren't posting, and they don't value the visibility that it sounds like you do.

You should listen to Scott's podcast: he has a wide array of guests, in many diverse topics (even topics that could be seen at odds with his employer, Microsoft). Most of them are people I've never heard of. If there are gatekeepers, Scott isn't one of them.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#56

Post by davesmith1983 »

lukeschlather wrote: post #50
davesmith1983 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part the situation is the same with .NET. Any code written in .NET 2.0 should work with 4.7. The newer .NET Core most stuff is now compatible and it is pretty easy to write code that is compatible. Stuff that isn't compatible normally needs you to install a compat shim that Microsoft provides, but I've not needed them so far. My major frustration is with the JS frameworks. I wrote some perfectly good Ang…

I haven't been working with .NET for very long, but my experience is that mixing .NET Core and .NET Framework leads frequently to very confusing, inscrutable error messages about incompatibility between the two. Though if it builds it works fine.

The accepted method is convert projects to .NET standard and/or multi-target project itself. I haven't run into any issues but most of what I do is web projects, I wouldn't know if it was something like WPF.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#58

Post by mtbcoder »

emeraldd wrote: post #42
siwatanejo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is PHP still a thing?

PHP is horrible as a language, but it fills its niche very well: * You can get it to run dang near anywhere. * It has an extremely low barrier to entry for new devs (blessing and a curse). * There's a large volume of code already out there. * If you need something that's a little more than a static site but not a full blown custom system, it's one of the simplest ways to get something out the door. * If you know how…

> PHP is horrible as a language

Eh, that's not really the case anymore either. It's made many improvements over the years. Not that I'm saying it's some wonderful language, but you can't really compare it to the PHP 4/early 5 days. I think credit is deserved to the folks who have brought PHP to where it is today.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#59

Post by CM30 »

caymanjim wrote: post #53

I keep up with modern tech. I regularly learn new languages and frameworks. I lead agile dev teams. I work as a consultant modernizing devops and moving to cloud deployments. I write real software for real businesses doing real things. I don't blog. I don't go to conferences. I don't go to hackathons. I don't have any meaningful presence on GitHub. Hacker News is about the only place I have even the slightest footpri…

> If you spend all your time trying to prove to strangers that you're hip to the latest trends, just how much time are you spending doing anything of actual value?

This is something I've wondered about a lot of social media users to be honest. I mean, if you're seeming spending all day on Twitter or what not, how are you finding the time to actually do any work? Do any of these super outgoing social media addicted conference every week developers actually have a full time job? Or is their entire career about promoting themselves?

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#60

Post by mtbcoder »

rowanG077 wrote: post #54
cblum wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not count those?

Because they are not really "code". Just like I don't consider someone making cookies from ready cookie dough a baker.

I mean, the underlying code base is still PHP (granted the code base is awful) but there's a lot of Java spaghetti code out there too you know.
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