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Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

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Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#71

Post by EpicEng »

nostrademons wrote: post #59
EpicEng wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but even then I wonder how much of that complexity (the scaling bit) is actually implemented by the front end devs. I would assume that it's handled on the back end, but of course a UI like FB, used by 1.7 billion people, can't be an easy thing to design.

At least at Google, "front end dev" extended down to the webserver tier, written in C++/Java. You were expected to make any changes necessary inside the webserver to complete your feature. That's part of what made hiring so hard: the number of devs who know Javascript and C++ and have their algorithms down cold is relatively low. I imagine it's fairly similar at Facebook.

Of course, that's not the definition most 'front end devs' fall under.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#72

Post by abritinthebay »

EpicEng wrote: post #54
abritinthebay wrote: post #52

Dunning-Kruger right here folks.

Good one. Trite comments like yours always make for good discussion. Care to elaborate on why you think I'm wrong?

That would take a novel. The overarching theme would end up being that you don't know as much about front-end development as you apparently think you do.

Which is what I said in the first place anyhow.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#73

Post by artellectual »

I don't think experience is replaceable. There are certain things in software that doesn't change.

- solving the problem at hand.

- solving it in the quickest time possible

- the solution to the problem should not introduce new problems

I think for experienced programmer such as yourself the knowledge that you "lose" or "decays" don't actually become useless. I think they will serve you in making better future decisions like for example what you are saying now. Realizing whether things are 'fads' or 'foundational ideas' is a big asset for an experienced programmer.

The same way with doctors. Their tools are changing rapidly but the underlying concept is still the same. She may not know about all the new tools but she understands how a heart works, and because of that she can gauge if the new tool is just a 'fad' or will it change how things are done fundamentally.

I think every career path has this in some degree or another.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#74

Post by fineline »

smoyer wrote: post #23
tluyben2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People over 30 feel 'old' every 10 years. That's nothing new; it's not even 'programmers are 20something'; people becoming 30-40-50-60 have all been saying 'now I am old' while we stand to become 90-100 (at least in western EU), so 60 is not that old. 40 (i'm 41) is spring chicken and I look forward to many years telling my younger colleagues that the latest thing, however interesting to learn about, is not always be…

I never said that I was old ... One good sign is that my wife keeps telling me to act my age!

Nobody has any experience of being any older than they currently are, but a lifetime's memory of being younger. Hence most people of all ages feel old.

One trick I like to play on myself is to imagine I come back from twenty years in the future. What advice would I give myself? First thing would have to be "shut up about being old! Your life is still ahead of you."

I like the other trick too, where I imagine being visited by a teenage me and thinking what he would say about where I'm at. It can be an awkward conversation. Where's the Ferrari?

As a less whacky version, pay really good attention to your parents and your kids.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#75

Post by btown »

sotojuan wrote: post #30
tluyben2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. I tend to discover that the core principles are the same, this time someone has added another C to MVC; or the put their spin on an API for doing X; But that is only for the 'abstractions' they implement; the details are another thing. I feel the only thing that really changed is that now big companies with PR / mark…

The Webpack story is interesting because its author isn't (well, wasn't) even a JS developer in his day job or was part of the JS community. I don't hate Webpack but I really have no idea where it came from. Browserify was made by one of Node's ecosystem top contributors, so at least that makes sense.

And webpack's documentation is the spawn of Satan. Going outside the typical use cases is downright impossible. While it has the widest feature set out there, it's incredibly difficult to believe in its reliability. That said, since you can always QA your bundle, reliability isn't as much of an issue I guess...

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#76

Post by 20years »

carsongross wrote: post #25

I get where the guy is coming from, I'm right there as an old guy. On the other hand, I think there is a bit too much fatalism in the article. Sometimes the kids are being stupid, and they need to be told so. The vast majority of web apps could be built in 1/10th the code with server-side rendering and intercooler.js. All this client-side crap is wasted when you are trying to get text from computer A into data-store…

+1 for intercooler.js

So easy and quick to get going with it.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#77

Post by randomdata »

EpicEng wrote: post #19
Zyst wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twentysomething year old here, so you know, not like you don't have a point but: >the other reason is because it's easy/boring as hell I legitimately think front end development is not only very fun, it can have some really challenging aspects. I wouldn't think there's any programming challenge that is inherently easier because it's on web as opposed to something else. Of course I bet there are domain-specific tasks…

Well, sorry, but... it is. Maybe you find it interesting, that's subjective, but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff. You're not solving hard engineering problems; you're pasting together libraries other people wrote on top of libraries other people wrote (and on it goes) and searching google to figure out why your opaque stack doesn't seem to be working. Developing a good UI is difficult, no quest…

> You're not solving hard engineering problems

What, in your mind, makes an engineering problem hard? I've certainly had to dig out CS algorithms and 'clever' applications thereof to reach desirable performance out of some custom widgets in front end projects. I don't know if that can considered hard – hindsight tends to make everything seem easy – but it is certainly beyond pasting in a library like you describe.

I have to agree that you can create some very useful projects that do not deviate from a framework/library's documentation, or what have you. But we don't really know what the parent in particular is working on.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#78

Post by asimuvPR »

sotojuan wrote: post #28
delinka wrote: post #13

I'm a bit older than the author. Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. I tend to discover that the core principles are the same, this time someone has added another C to MVC; or the put their spin on an API for doing X; or you can tell they didn't learn from the previous solution and this new one misses the mark, but it'll be three years before anyone noti…

What's the last truly new thing you can think of? I'm interested because I am young (22) but have studied programming language paradigms and history and I also agree a lot of "new" stuff is old.

Anything to do with computer vision controlled navigation is a good source of new challenges and new discoveries / inventions.

Re: Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

#80

Post by WalterBright »

noname123 wrote: post #24
thesmallestcat wrote: post #2

Hm. The author works for a web/mobile development agency and uses React Native and GWT as examples of the new and the old, respectively. I hope it isn't news to anybody here that this sort of work is a race to the bottom and has such turnover precisely because it's mostly being done by junior developers. Linux systems programming arcana, for instance, doesn't disintegrate so quickly as the ten years the author cites.…

Yes. I'd love to hear some people's journeys to advance their career and move from web development into more specialization. Off the top of my head, there are three types of specialization, for money, for domain knowledge and for technical skills. For Money: Not necessarily any more satisfying or churn-proof than web development; But definitely more lucrative. Salesforce/SAP/Oracle consultant, mobile app developer, S…

I started dabbling in compilers early on and just got increasingly into them and their associated tools. It's still fun watching a new optimization rumble into life:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6176

(Yes I know some other compilers do that already.)

It's fun knowing how it all works from the source code to the executable.

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