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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#541

Post by titusjohnson »

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…

Oh man, that brings me back. My first tech job was an ecommerce company that a basic online cart with backed by incredibly in-depth set of industry catalogs. We also sold a marketing package as an add-on to the online store where we would proactivly contact our customers and get the info from them to replicate their monthly/weekly physical advertising on the web. This was back in '05-ish, lots of money to be made just helping people get their business online.

We had a group of talented designers/artists wrangling Photoshop and pumping out a few of these designs a day, each, and as we scaled up and gained a lot of repeat customers, tracking these PSDs became a big problem. The designers were graphically talented, not technically savvy. The PSDs were stored on a shared NAS drive that the whole company could see. The designers had a complex naming system to manage major revisions, but overall there was no "history" beyond the classic "_v2_2008_09_best.psd" naming technique.

Several times every week I had to fix "accidentally dragged the PSD folder somewhere and lost it" level problems. Getting IM'd from tech support because the underlying server was falling over trying to clone the multi-GB folder 3 times, logging into a workstation as Admin and searching for an updated PSD that the vacationing Designer hadn't synced back to the NAS before leaving for work, that kind of thing.

As soon as I was promoted to Supervisor I made my first big move. It took a lot of training, far more talking than I thought it should (back then I didn't know anything about politics), but I was able to get SVN implemented to replace the NAS share. I wrote quick-reference documents, in-depth guides, (this was before I knew that no one reads anything, ever, for any reason) and eventually just had to do one-on-one training with everyone just to explain the concept and basic useage.

One of the most satisfying feelings of my career continues to be watching attitudes change over the course of a summer. None of the design-y people liked the new set of hoops they had to jump through. Check-Out, Check-In, Lock, etc, it was "too much". Then, at a happy hour someone mentioned how we hadn't lost the PSD folder in a while. Later someone came to me panicking because a client wanted to re-run an ad from 2 months ago with a couple tweaks, and she didn't have the source PSD or the source material -- I did a live demo on how to get a historical version back, and that's when it really clicked with everyone. With internal political will behind the toolset, it now became an IT problem, as our SVN useage was nothing like Engineering's usage.

Of course file locking was a huge PITA, that feature replaced "forgot to copy the changed file back before vacation" as a problem category. But it also eliminated the problem where 2 people would open the same PSD directly from the NAS share, make their changes, and only the last one to save gets their work persisted. So, a toss-up I guess.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#542

Post by pletnes »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #288
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…

> 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 obvious: installing Visual Studio for each customer on site and teaching the users to run the app in debug mode from Visual Studio. Holy smoke! That's actually the most creative solution (horrible, but creative) I've ever heard to fix a Heisenbug: https://en.wikipedia.o…

Often it’s enough to compile in debug mode and maybe set an env var! This sounds like a horrible approach by all measures I think.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#543

Post by beembeem »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #125
Vampiero wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, you move the type checks from the database to the app, effectively, which is not a new idea by any means (and a bad idea in many cases), but with JSON, it can actually work out nicely-ish, as long as there are no significant relationships between tables. That way you're throwing away 50% of the reason you use a relational database in the first place. Has it occurred to you that MongoDB exists? Also I don't un…

How does MongoDB handle someone pulling the power cord out of the server? Because that’s another reason to use something like SQLite, and it often gets used in embedded systems.

This is a joke right? It journals updates to disk and has a well-defined recovery procedure.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#544

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #37
Nexialist wrote: post #31

My worst codebase story: In my first real job, I worked for a company that maintained a large legacy product programmed in a combination of COBOL and Java. In order to work on the Java side of the product, you checked out individual files from source control to work on, which 'locked' the files and prevented other developers from checking out the same files. This functionality was not part of our actual source contro…

This sounds so much like dealing with MS Access databases... Unfortunately, part of my responsibility in my current role is to manage a handful of Access applications... they are ancient, I am talking early 2000's. They are the most unruly thing I have ever had to work with, and I will not go into details but your story reminds me so much of having to work on these apps...

MSAccess is a tragedy, imo. Right-up until, say, Access 2007, it was a simple (in a good way!) RAD platform following those zombie 4GL predecessors, but it’s been left to stagnate without any real effort to modernise it, and it’s clear from how Microsoft’s been downplaying Access that it’s a product they’d really rather not have to support, but they know if they do kill it then it would weaken on-prem Office’s moat and everyone will probably just rush to Google Firebase.

Most of Access’ problem is how it’s inseparable from both VBA and COM. While Microsoft has tried to make COM sexy again with WinRT and C++/CX, VBA is quite senile now. Microsoft has killed VBA in Outlook, killed VBScript in Windows Server, and is now trying to kill VBA in Excel too. MS is pitching modern JS as a successor (which I’m not too mad about…) but I just don’t see how JS could unseat the sheer volume of Access VBA out there. Especially as “Office JS” is intentionally kneecapped for things like local computer files and Win32 so it has feature parity on web vs mobile app vs desktop - it’s going to be awful.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#545

Post by m463 »

gumby wrote: post #211
fouronnes3 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Astonishingly, It took a long time for revision control to become widespread. Around 1991 when Cygnus had 6-7 employees and was based in the apartment complex where I lived, none of the GNU codebase was hosted in any sort of revision control. Everything was FTPed around as obscurely named tarballs. We had gathered something like 27 different forks of gdb floating around the net, for example. This was back when forkin…

I remember working somewhere where revision control actually created a mess.

I believe the problem was a combination of xenix (with limited length filenames) and sccs (which used 's.' to store each file).

Anyway, long filenames like longestpossiblename.c got checked into revision control as s.longestpossiblename where the s. prefix truncated the .c at the end

Later builds would fail since the checked out file longestpossiblename was no longer a c file and wouldn't compile.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#547

Post by lutoma »

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

Oh man that description immediately made me think of a government IT job a friend used to work in

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#548

Post by deathanatos »

jacobyoder wrote: post #245
deathanatos wrote: post #154

Two early databases I worked on. The first contained monetary values. These were split over two columns, a decimal column holding the magnitude of the value, and a string column, containing an ISO currency code. Sounds good so far, right? Well, I learned much later (after, of course, having relied on the data) that the currency code column had only been added after expanding into Europe … but not before expanding int…

> 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…

> I bet no one even considered the idea that someone in Canada might pay in USD dollars.

Certainly not I, at the time! (In my defense, I was an intern, and was shocked to learn that rows labelled "USD" could not be assumed to be USD. I hope today I am less naïve… but even by today me's standards, that's pretty appalling data quality.)

> I was voted down as not understanding how banks worked.

Yep, I feel this. The best engineers I have worked with make it their job to become an expert in the subject matter they're designing/engineering software for. I mean … why wouldn't they?

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#549

Post by Suppafly »

oooyay wrote: post #316
jsmeaton wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t think if the company behind GitHub went all-in on mercurial that might have emerged as the winner? There were plenty of companies using either. Git wasn’t the only distributed game in town. I definitely think GitHub had a lot to do with it.

Before there was GitHub there was Sourceforge. Sourceforge supported several different protocols and git still won. Gits internals can be confusing at first, but once you understand them there's really nothing you can't do. Being distributed by design also helps.

To be fair, by the time git came around, sourceforge had been enshitifying itself for 10 years or so. Git would be popular without github, github just makes things easier.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#550

Post by Suppafly »

mleo wrote: post #155
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…

I know things have gotten somewhat better, but the amount of wasted time and latency of using RDP and Windows UI for development, testing and production maintenance is insane. Throw in some security requirements of RDP into host 1 to the RDP jump to host 2 and companies are just wasting money on latency. There is, often, not an appreciation of the administrative costs of the delivery. Not necessarily system admin cos…

>Throw in some security requirements of RDP into host 1 to the RDP jump to host 2 and companies are just wasting money on latency.

So much this at my job, login to my laptop, login to vpn using password and 2-factor, check out my admin credentials using my login and 2-factor, login to the jump box using my admin creds and a different 2-factor, finally login to the system I need to be on using my admin creds. Multiply the last step by however many systems I need to connect to. Also, the clipboard and screen resolution are going to get messed up along the way no matter how much you mess with the settings.

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