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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#531

Post by DidYaWipe »

lowdownbutter wrote: post #251
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…

My first role was with a company who had hit a limit for VB6 variable names iirc. So they'd all been renamed to shorter names. This may be the same issue. They were in the process of rewriting in VB.net.

That sounds like they were doing something dumb. VB6 did not have a limit for variable names, unless it was 255 characters or something.

And yep, I just checked: The limit was 255 characters.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#533

Post by phatskat »

KronisLV wrote: post #408
gumby wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder. I acknowledge that Git is really good on a technical level, but don't like the CLI experience regardless. Instead, I much prefer to use tools like GitKraken (paid), SourceTree (free, limited platform support), Git Cola (free, lightweight, a bit basic) and know that most of my colleagues just use the Git integration in their IDE of choice. Working that way, it's a decidedly p…

git has plenty I like and lots of things I would rather not do, but I find most GUIs too obfuscating. I do patch adds, I prefer resolving conflicts in the raw file, and as many plugins as I’ve tried for vim to make git “pretty”, they just don’t hit for me. I used Kraken for a while but ultimately it just felt like unnecessary fluff - knowing the commands I’m using makes me feel like I know what’s going to happen, and GUIs make me feel like I’m not sure. I’m happy for my coworkers that use them, and I’m also usually the first person to get a ping when something beyond what makes sense in the GUI comes up.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#534

Post by rk06 »

In my first job, I was part of an offshore ops team who maintained lot of code that no one (Onshore and offshore) wants to maintain. But like all ops. Code, it was business critical.

This included a project called IefParser, its job was to parse incoming data files and put the data into databases. It was a serious project. Like really serious. The software input format came with a full manual with a section highlighting the changes from previous versions. I have not seen that level of detail before or since.

And It was also very old. Written about a year or two after I was born.and never rewritten after. So the software side of things were less serious and more hacky.

Core code was written in C. Database used was oracle. And code was driven by Perl batch script triggered via cron job. And all that ran on IBM AIX (unix). Yes,not windows or Linux. It ran on unix.

The sheer difference in software requirements which were meticulously and the software was mind boggling.

Some fun facts:

- c code could not be compiled on windows . You need to login to dev server via putty and run makefile to do it.

- Perl code was not checked in to repository. Perl code also was different for each environment.

- unix version has a vi editor which for some reason didn’t tell if you were in edit mode or command mode. WTF! Yes, other editor didn’t exist. Apparently I was only one who bothered to learn vi in India. As no one else in India could reliably edit files

- cron job schedule was also no checked in. After a “great learning opportunity “, I decided indeed to check that in

- I once had the horror of fixing bugs in Perl and cron job. Apparently global variables are the state of art in Perl.

- cron job always failed on New Year’s Day because the batch script uses MMDD formatted folder for temp file storage, and was unable to understand 0101 is greater than 1231. I volunteered to track down the issue, and fix it for good. M3 shot it down saying, “we don’t to take risks on such a mission critical service”

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#535

Post by deterministic »

I loved reading this article. It made me laugh and cry and rage scream all at the same time. It is a true miracle that most things work most of the time. Don't look behind the curtains fowks! It might give you nightmares.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#536

Post by tengwar2 »

thayne wrote: post #217
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…

> There was a LOT of global variables (seemingly random 4 uppercase letters) controlling everything. I once ran across a (c) program that had 26 variables, each one letter long, one for each letter of the alphabet. They were all global variables. And many of them were re-used for completely unrelated things.

I inherited a control program from Risø National Laboratories. It had roughly 600 globals of the form A9$, three local variables, and one comment - "Midlertidig".

However on a more practical note, the "Java" used on Smartcards effectively requires that all variables be treated as constants, other than one array. You dynamically allocate the array when handing an event, and it only lasts for the duration of that event.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#537

Post by zelphirkalt »

jiggawatts wrote: post #526
zelphirkalt wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not talking about Windows updates here. But even if I was, there are things wrong with it. One example, that frequently bites me on my gaming OS:

Windows 10 by itself decides: "Hey, I'm going to replace your installed graphics card driver with some other version, that I will find myself online!" Then next time I start this OS, I get crashing graphics card driver and need to go and look on AMD website for the correct drivers, installing them over whatever crap Windows installed. This has happened at least 3 times already and it is pissing me off. It would probably be better to deactivate automatic Windows updates completely and then try to have a manual selection of installed components. But even then I could not be sure, that it will not try to replace my installed drivers with crap.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#538

Post by throwaway03254 »

cyanydeez wrote: post #320
blacklight wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been there. There was this old fashioned developer in one of the companies I worked for a decade ago who never understood nor embraced version control (we were talking of SVN at the time, not even git). Luckily that wasn't the case for all the others developers in the company. But when it came to the projects he owned, I witnessed several scenes along the lines of "hey, customer X has an issue with your component Y,…

Perhaps he was more concerned with job control, and saw centralized code as a detriment to his job security

I have a confession to make. I was working in a company where the main development center was located in a different country. The main development center wanted to centralize all code on a single SVN server and move the build process to Jenkins

I said we already had source control (CVS) and a a working build process (a script on a server that pulled from CVS, built a jar file and deployed it to X servers). We were too "busy" at the moment but would look into it in the future. This never happened.

The real reason was that I was concerned that the central development center would take over the project, as they had tried to do so in the past. Looking back, I should probably have let them take over as there was more than enough work for everyone.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#539

Post by phatskat »

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

I read it as harsh to MySpace, because that was very unfair to MySpace imo

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#540

Post by Izkata »

jsonis wrote: post #309
Izkata wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fortunately, my session database is just 'JSON(B) in a single table', so I was able to add those additional fields without the need for any migrations. And SQLite's `json_extract` makes adding indexes after-the-fact super-easy. Our solution for a similar situation involving semi-structured data (in postgres) was to double it up: put all the json we send/receive with a vendor into a json field, then anything we actu…

This is exactly what I've tried (and failed at) doing! Can I ask how you handle normalization from vendor data when it contains relationships and multilevel nesting? How do you know when to create a new child table, and which ones to create, and their relationships etc. I haven't found a good balance yet.

Basically what the other reply said - handle it the same as you would any complex data. You just don't need to handle all of the json immediately, only the parts you plan on using for the moment.
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