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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#521

Post by BobbyTables2 »

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.

Wait until you work in an industry where customers are extremely reluctant to upgrade and each one lands on a different release.

Then you have to start tracking the limitations and issues in 2-3 year old releases and the solution to issues is never “upgrade to the latest”.

At that point, source control starts feeling worthless.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#522

Post by mlhpdx »

parpfish wrote: post #148
The_Colonel wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this level of dysfunction, installing git won't do anything. You need a holistic change in thinking which starts with convincing people there's a problem.

Yeah, this level of dysfunction takes years to cultivate. You need the “Dead Sea effect” to be in effect long enough that not only have the good people left, but for them to have been gone long enough that people rising into management have never even worked with somebody competent so they don’t know there’s a better way

Years, and a special kind of myopia in leadership to not see the seeds sprouting. It doesn’t happen quickly, but once established is very, very expensive to fix.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#523

Post by yyyfb »

MBCook wrote: post #494
yyyfb wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 para…

With a single server sure, but anything complex than that, most companies don't have a well-rehearsed cold start procedure.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#525

Post by zelphirkalt »

jiggawatts wrote: post #278
lemme_tell_ya wrote: post #83

My first day at my first full-time programming gig, I was asked to look at some reporting job that had been failing to run for months. I logged in, found the error logs, found that it needed a bit more memory assigned to the script (just a tweak in the php.ini) and let the team lead know it should run fine that night. He was shocked, "Dude, if you just fixed that report you probably just got a promotion, no one has b…

The reverse also applies, where people that like Linux just totally ignore Windows maintenance. They’ll look down their noses at it and say that it’s insecure when they spend their time patching Linux and leaving Windows to fend for itself against attackers.

Someone must have made that "smart" decision to use servers with a proprietary OS, so that someone surely has paid the extra cost for MS support. No need to worry then.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#526

Post by jiggawatts »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #525
jiggawatts wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reverse also applies, where people that like Linux just totally ignore Windows maintenance. They’ll look down their noses at it and say that it’s insecure when they spend their time patching Linux and leaving Windows to fend for itself against attackers.

Someone must have made that "smart" decision to use servers with a proprietary OS, so that someone surely has paid the extra cost for MS support. No need to worry then.

Windows Updates are free.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#527

Post by rstuart4133 »

inkyoto wrote: post #361
chris_wot wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

git didn't win because of GitHub. Sure, GitHub helped a lot. But actually, it's because its a DVCS, and it does branching and merging way better than anything I've seen so far. You can thank BitKeeper for all of this, and Andrew Tridgwell for forcing Linus Torvalds into creating git.

Yes, git has solved a big problem with version control: it has made transactional atomic changesets (commits in the git parlance) mainstream. A git repository is a tree of atomic changesets that group changes into meaningful chunks as opposed to a versioned tree of files where changes to each file are harder to trace back to the intent, i.e. whether or not they are related. Atomic commits can also easily be moved aro…

> Larry McVoy was famously wont to engage in trolling upon the Linux Kernel Mailing List, whereupon he did boast of his BitKeeper, which possessed atomic changesets. Concurrently, he did deride Subversion for its lack of the same

Subversion definitely has atomic commits. That was it's major advance over CVS.

The major difference between svn and git/hg is svn assumes a centralised repository, whereas git/hg are designed to work as distributed repositories that exchange change sets.

Turns out that you can build sophisticated work flows on top of features they added to support that distributed model - things like PR's. These things are useful even if you have a single centralised monorepositiry of the style svn insists on.

But atomic commits aren't part distributed feature set. You need them in a monorepositiry. After you've experienced your CVS repository being turned into a mess by two people doing a commit at the same time that becomes obvious.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#528

Post by xp84 »

doublepg23 wrote: post #362
xp84 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started reading and was hoping someone had installed one of the Linux distros that were popular at the turn of the millennium, like Mandrake, Slackware, etc. and it was still trucking along 25 years later.

Oldest boxes running are RHEL5 and Win Server 2008. I was trying to explain to the IT Director that both were released when I was in elementary school so I'd have to brush up on them.

cries in millennial

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#529

Post by Aeolun »

trustno2 wrote: post #446
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.

Does this seem like a healthy person to you? https://www.instagram.com/durov/

I feel like those are missing a bear.

I guess the best thing that can be said is at least he’s confident enough in himself to post that.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#530

Post by qup »

collinmanderson wrote: post #493
qup wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Nice.

I worked briefly on a site that had this rankings page for users, and it was done by going player by player, and pulling the players table each loop to compare the current player to all the others. For things like "results against women"

Anyway you could DDoS the site by requesting that page. You could actually watch the page fill in as it computed, I want to say it was about a ten second load time.

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