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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#561

Post by collinmanderson »

qup wrote: post #530
collinmanderson wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I think it's surprising how websites don't get DoS'd more often.

DoS has become more of an issue now that all of the GPTBots are generating a lot more traffic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40865627

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#562

Post by IIsi50MHz »

cmpalmer52 wrote: post #301

I once had a project to turn a customer’s Excel VBA application into a real application (I used ASP.Net). He had been hacking on this Excel spreadsheet for like 15 years. Once I printed the VBA code because it was hard to navigate and it was like 250+ pages printed out rather compactly. The worse part wasn’t the code itself (although it was bad), but the fact that there was so much abandoned paths in it and there wou…

That's more adventurous than all the Excel projects I've been given. Many of the most satisfying solutions are the most simple that nobody's implemented yet.

Like, at a job where all the lead devs and, apparently, the whole internet agreed that you can't do proper source control for Excel because you can't export-and-import code for all modules (including sheets & ThisWorkbook) without copy-paste and because a running module can't replace itself. The solution ending up so simple, that I was embarrassed to hear it called "a stroke of genius". I still have that code somewhere.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#563

Post by samspot »

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.

Setting up git is the easy part. We all used it. Except the owner of the company who would fix bugs in prod and not tell anyone. Then next release we'd unintentionally un-fix those bugs because the fixes never made it back to source control.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#564

Post by IIsi50MHz »

nicopappl wrote: post #447

Wow, this is exactly how I felt with regard to my first job as well. This old codebase no one wants to touch but works somehow. The quite nice later-on additions. Even the "build a pipe-separated string using reflection and a 150 classes hierarchy" rings something. The old codebase was an hairy ball of scala using a very outdated version of a (now) infamous actor framework. Before they figured out that untyped messag…

> To understand what would be a single function in a normal code base, you would have to dive through half a dozen files through several repositories to piece together the logic.

I've experienced something like this, where the other devs preferred to breakecode down into the smallest units possible. I often saw a half-page procedure changed into multiple function calls, each with their own boilerplate and error handling (as required by the style-guide), such that you could not view the entire logic on one screen.

Every procedure name described the intent, they said, so you know what the parent did without having to worry about details like how it did it. I, meanwhile, trying to track down what the actual implementation was, would hold as many subfunctions as I could in windows with a tiny font, and hold the rest in my head…just to find out stuff like:

"Oh, so it's trying to use system feature foo.x, but I know foo.x is broken current release for a certain edgecase. Which case happens to be what our customer does all the time…"

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#565

Post by tomjen3 »

llm_trw wrote: post #471
tomjen3 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is pretty unnatural, but CVS? That is much closer to the "copy a shared file back and forth between people", except with nice things such as "keep track of who is editing what", "know what the latest edition is", and "keep track of the history". That said, if I was going to start out teaching someone coding today, version control would be timestamped .zip files.

>That said, if I was going to start out teaching someone coding today, version control would be timestamped .zip files. Oh no, we're in a different time zone. >We'll put the timezone in. Oh no, it's daylight savings time.

Entirely besides the point I was trying to make. I wasn’t trying to say that it’s a good idea for a team, but that git is complicated. Too complicated for beginners.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#566

Post by breakingcups »

marcosdumay wrote: post #34
surfingdino wrote: post #27

I had dubious pleasure of working with similar codebases and devs. I'll remember one of those guys forever, because whenever he wanted to work on a new branch he would clone the repo, make changes to the master branch, and push code to a new repo numbered repo0001, repo002, ... He refused to change his ways, because "I have a PhD so you are wrong". Another WTF moment was realisation that MS SQL Server does not suppor…

> Another WTF moment was realisation that MS SQL Server does not support BOOLEAN type. The standard does not have a boolean type. It's a postgres extension that the other open source databases adopted (because, yeah, it's obvious). But the proprietary ones insist on not having. The official recommendation is using byte on MS SQL and char(1) on Oracle. Both are ridiculous.

I don't think that's true. Even 2005 had a bit type and it's better optimized for space: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/data-types/bit-t...

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#567

Post by lowdownbutter »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #531
lowdownbutter wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think more like globally. Like there was a fixed amount of space for all variable names.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#569

Post by donall »

yyyfb wrote: post #468
donall wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a visceral reaction to this comment! I once joined a company doing ETL with Apache camel and a half dozen underpowered pet machines. Ingesting their entire dataset and running a suite of NLP models took 3-6 months (estimated; it was so slow nobody ever reprocessed the data to fix bugs or release improvements). I drew up a simple architecture using Kafka, hbase, and MapReduce to implement a lambda architecture.…

But maybe this isn't really what they felt that they needed at the time? I don't mean to defend bad practices, but your comment makes it sound like nobody had tasked you with re-architecting the business, and you took it upon yourself to show them how it should be done (in your opinion), without having earned the necessary trust. This might have also come across as patronizing, or at least antagonistic, and in any ca…

Fair comment. And I'm usually suspicious of young engineers wanting to implement the new hotness and I'm also a fan of "if it ain't broken don't fix it". In this case, though, the system was in very rough shape. Our customers were complaining about data problems which we had no way to fix (short of manually editing the prod db, which was the SOP). I definitely took it upon myself to do something that nobody had asked for, but it was because the people in charge were entirely asleep at the wheel! They did not last long in their positions.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#570

Post by Calamitous »

ahazred8ta wrote: post #557
cubano wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't believe the amount of crap I take whenever I introduce very basic version control at the various 3 to 6 man shops I find work at these days. I'm 100% sure that once I left that the devs went back to remote server crash and burn FTP development...they couldn't be bothered with the "hassle" and unneeded headaches of git.

There was a new hire who was told to make a small change in a piece of server software, found the repo, read the docs, made the change, ran it in testing, and pushed to prod. Cue the 'senior engineer' screaming bloody blue murder because he'd been directly monkeypatching the servers for 3 years with no vc and no backups.

That’s… not a senior engineer. Whatever his title may have been.
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