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Worst of breed software

worstofbreed.net

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Re: Worst of breed software

#51

Post by tombert »

jmalicki wrote: post #50
tombert wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I was working on more of an infra thing (involving caching and indexing). Certainly important given the size of the company, but not something that gets lots of hype or sexiness. There were occasional bits of ambition to occasionally work on interesting stuff, but it was mostly a “keep the lights on and then figure out how to make yourself seem important”. One of my biggest pet peeves is when engineers say that…

You're complaining about resume driven development in the same thread you're upset they wouldn't let you rewrite everything in ZeroMQ? That is a very inconsistent position, and reflects extreme confirmation bias, and by itself justifies that you may need to look in the mirror.

I didn’t want to rewrite everything in ZeroMQ. I wanted to rewrite one 2000 line service with ZeroMQ because the service was already broken and I was the only person who was dealing with the consequences because I was the only person who got paged for that particular service.

Usually I advocated for doing things a more boring way, and I certainly don’t agree with making every damn thing an “initiative”, which was my biggest issue at BigCo.

I don’t think it’s inconsistent. I wanted to use the right tool for the right job. Usually I can get by with Java’s built in tooling, and that was my initial attempt at a rewrite, but I ended up trying to re-invent a bunch of concurrency patterns with BlockingQueue and I found that literally everything I was spending a lot of (my own free) time was handled in like four lines of ZeroMQ.

I have a single line on my resume for ZeroMQ as a keyword, despite having used it in many, many projects, so it certainly wasn’t using explicitly to pad my resume.

Re: Worst of breed software

#53

Post by FourierSerious »

jmalicki wrote: post #50
tombert wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I was working on more of an infra thing (involving caching and indexing). Certainly important given the size of the company, but not something that gets lots of hype or sexiness. There were occasional bits of ambition to occasionally work on interesting stuff, but it was mostly a “keep the lights on and then figure out how to make yourself seem important”. One of my biggest pet peeves is when engineers say that…

You're complaining about resume driven development in the same thread you're upset they wouldn't let you rewrite everything in ZeroMQ? That is a very inconsistent position, and reflects extreme confirmation bias, and by itself justifies that you may need to look in the mirror.

If @tombert worked for me at BigCo, I'd give them a big raise for doing the exact right thing. This is Employee of the Year performance.

@tombert recognized that the homegrown tech was awful (*) and proposed a mature, reliable, well documented and supported, low-cost, utterly mainstream and mature replacement. That's not resume packing, that's pragmatic, rational software design.

@tombert also knows that every tech professional must routinely learn new things, otherwise they'll be unemployable dinosaurs long before retirement age. Tech dinosaurs aren't a pretty thing in the workplace.

(*) Especially awful because these are mutex and concurrency bugs, and @tombert knew that nondeterministic bugs cost expensive resources to investigate, find, and fix, simply because these bugs are unreproducible. Unlike straightforward deterministic bugs, concurrency bugs are open-ended tar pits that managers and engineers despise. These kind of bugs can eat up a project's schedule and energy.

edited: formatting bug. Fortunately it was reproducible!

Re: Worst of breed software

#54

Post by tombert »

FourierSerious wrote: post #53
jmalicki wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're complaining about resume driven development in the same thread you're upset they wouldn't let you rewrite everything in ZeroMQ? That is a very inconsistent position, and reflects extreme confirmation bias, and by itself justifies that you may need to look in the mirror.

If @tombert worked for me at BigCo, I'd give them a big raise for doing the exact right thing. This is Employee of the Year performance. @tombert recognized that the homegrown tech was awful (*) and proposed a mature, reliable, well documented and supported, low-cost, utterly mainstream and mature replacement. That's not resume packing, that's pragmatic, rational software design. @tombert also knows that every tech p…

I mean, obviously I agree with my own perspective :), but I do kind of understand the pushback to a certain extent.

Of course there are an effectively infinite number of potential routes you can go down with software, and of course you can't learn all of them, and you can't import every single helper library you'd like to.

We all like to think that the way we want to do things is objectively the best way, and I do think that there are objectively better ways of doing some things involving concurrency and the like, but a lot of the time it is subjective.

But as you said, I wasn't trying to import a library that was the latest hype on Hacker News; it's ZeroMQ. It's fast, well documented, easy to use, and very mature software with very good libraries in every major programming language, and it implements nearly every concurrency pattern that you'd want to use for most projects, and importantly it implements them correctly, which can be harder to do than it sounds.

As I said, I did have an attitude problem at that point in my career. I can blame it on a lot of stuff (untreated sleep apnea being a big one, as I later discovered), but I will admit I probably could have and should have been a bit more diplomatic in how I proposed these things.

I didn't really blame the person who wrote the code for it breaking (who had since left the company), because writing correct concurrent software is hard, I'm sure he had a reason at the time for doing it the way that he did, and of course all non-trivial software has bugs. What bothered me is that I had been designated at the sole person to deal with these issues, so I was the only person who had to deal with the consequences with these actions. The code hadn't been touched by anyone in years outside of adding basic NPE checks, and so I felt like people should let me try and fix it in a way that I thought would be less error-prone, and if it breaks I'd be the one forced to fix it anyway, and I could feature flag the hell out of it in case my code didn't work.

Re: Worst of breed software

#55

Post by FourierSerious »

tombert wrote: post #54
FourierSerious wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If @tombert worked for me at BigCo, I'd give them a big raise for doing the exact right thing. This is Employee of the Year performance. @tombert recognized that the homegrown tech was awful (*) and proposed a mature, reliable, well documented and supported, low-cost, utterly mainstream and mature replacement. That's not resume packing, that's pragmatic, rational software design. @tombert also knows that every tech p…

I mean, obviously I agree with my own perspective :), but I do kind of understand the pushback to a certain extent. Of course there are an effectively infinite number of potential routes you can go down with software, and of course you can't learn all of them, and you can't import every single helper library you'd like to. We all like to think that the way we want to do things is objectively the best way, and I do th…

> it implements nearly every concurrency pattern that you'd want to use for most projects, and importantly it implements them correctly, which can be harder to do than it sounds.

This is key. Writing nontrivial and bug-free concurrent code is extremely hard, it's like writing absolutely solid crypto code. Both look easy, both are incredibly hard and anyone who doesn't know that, shouldn't be writing code at those layers.

Recommending a proven, off-the-shelf concurrency technology is the mark of an experienced and thoughtful software architect.

Re: Worst of breed software

#56

Post by qeyii »

tombert wrote: post #48
locknitpicker wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of doing things ways that are easy and straightforward, you instead were incentivized to make your code complicated so you can brag about how complicated it is, (...) I see this as a red flag, and an attitude problem typical of toxic employees. I'll explain why. More often than not, I see this sort of complain from junior developers who either completely miss key requirements behind constraints or are compl…

I didn’t dispute attitude problems. If you had finished reading the comment you’re responding to you would have seen that. I also stand by what I said. I wasn’t trying to rework everything and I am not 100% sure how you reached that conclusion. There were just plenty of times that for certain things there were clear simpler ways of doing things but those weren’t sexy and you were only incentivized to constantly do th…

[dead]

Re: Worst of breed software

#57

Post by doodlesdev »

This might now be one of my favorite websites in the internet. It won me when I saw the "Excel Backend" design pattern [0]. I wish so fucking much I had never seen this before or heard of using Excel as a database.

update: I'm feeling actual physical pain by reading this and remembering every single piece of software or website I've seen that actually applies these patterns [1].

[0]: https://worstofbreed.net/patterns/excel-backend/

[1]: https://worstofbreed.net/patterns/js-bundle-bloat/

Re: Worst of breed software

#58

Post by funnybeam »

Devasta wrote: post #10
HendrikHensen wrote: post #7

Just last week at my job we apparently converged on a Kubernetes deployment to host a static site, due to company security policies related to publicly exposing buckets to the internet... I died a little inside that day.

Thats honestly the reason why most stuff is a web app these days. For desktop software you need to deal with IT security losers who recoil in horror at the idea of computers running software, and god help you if you need a port opened. Far better to shove everything through port 443 and redownload the software over and over until the end of time.

As an IT security loser it’s not your software I’m worried about, it’s your OpSec. I’ve seen enough innocuous software being owned and being used to deploy malware that it takes a lot of due diligence to trust providers of random binaries

Re: Worst of breed software

#59

Post by musicale »

I assumed it would just redirect to microsoft.com.

But instead it crystallizes the core methodologies of the entire industry.

This should probably be some sort of industry certification or ISO standard.

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