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Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

nytimes.com

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Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#81

Post by taude »

icebraining wrote: post #69
billysielu wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love your website. My experience (web app for heavily regulated industry): - Customers don't want major versions to be continuously deployed. Each deployment involves validation and training. They want the software to be left alone, perhaps with the occasional bug fix. - The business needs new features to stay competitive. - So you're left actually needing to host multiple versions. All the major versions the custo…

1-4 jibe with my experience.. that's why we built a SaaS cloud that allowed each customer (company, not individual users) to run a specific version of the platform, rather than the full multi-tenant model where everyone is on the same track. The latter may work for peripheral applications, but for core business apps it's a non-starter. Unfortunately, it often felt that we were having to write everything from scratch;…

We're in the same boat as you and our SAAS model involve custom deployment versions for each client. We're looking at trying to keep the databases unique per client, but handling the core requests in a multi-tenant environment, but it's difficult to plan ahead for all the different asks our customers need.

I often wish I worked at one of the SaaS product companies that target small-business.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#82

Post by icebraining »

taude wrote: post #81
icebraining wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1-4 jibe with my experience.. that's why we built a SaaS cloud that allowed each customer (company, not individual users) to run a specific version of the platform, rather than the full multi-tenant model where everyone is on the same track. The latter may work for peripheral applications, but for core business apps it's a non-starter. Unfortunately, it often felt that we were having to write everything from scratch;…

We're in the same boat as you and our SAAS model involve custom deployment versions for each client. We're looking at trying to keep the databases unique per client, but handling the core requests in a multi-tenant environment, but it's difficult to plan ahead for all the different asks our customers need. I often wish I worked at one of the SaaS product companies that target small-business.

I've considered that approach, but that means keeping the code fully retrocompatible, and that kinda leads to madness :D

Plus if you have different processes per client, you can provide better security, particularly in terms of leaking customer data to each other. In our case, we just used different Linux and Postgres users for each client, but even just that meant that a few security bugs discovered in the application couldn't be used to read/write data of other customers.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#83

Post by sidlls »

BatFastard wrote: post #76
sidlls wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been writing code for over 20 years now, longer in the industry than in academia now. The trend toward using the latest, shiny new thing seems to me to have accelerated, too. I would like to go back to a job where I work on code that includes decades old C and C++. Unfortunately those jobs tend to pay significantly less than others I can get.

I have used my share of shiny new things, I have created many shiny new things. But you can not build a society based on shiny new things. At a certain point the churn rate gets too high. A friend of mine is working for an internet security company that seems to have the enlightened attitude towards software, everything is test driven and the majority is C++ and Java. This code will be around in 20 years, and will br…

I don't disagree. I'm just saying the market doesn't currently seem to value that.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#84

Post by graphitezepp »

billysielu wrote: post #70
akkartik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tends to be mainstream opinion today: figure out the timeless essence at different scales, decompose it into abstractions, freeze their interfaces so that people can start relying on them, and so on. But it doesn't seem to have helped for forty years of trying to do it. The world changes too quickly, we aren't quite as good at designing libraries as we think, the world is filled with historical accidents in inte…

I agree. It's especially pungent in JavaScript, in which the average 'JavaScript developer' is playing some perverse game of library pokemon.

Definitely stealing Javascript Pokemon. Seriously why are people still adopting more libraries to perpetuate this insanity.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#85

Post by saltyworker »

nightski wrote: post #45
nathanvanfleet wrote: post #35

I mean, I think the best way to start with this is to use a word other than "maintenance." That's not really the most sexy word if you really want people to get behind it. Furthermore it just suggests that the work is keeping something as good as it was from the beginning. Filling in holes, giving it a coat of paint every now and then. What it really should be called is "refinement." The innovation ends up being incr…

The fact that you need a sexy word is indicative of the problem.

The fact that you need a sexy word is indicative of _human nature_

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#86

Post by kerkeslager »

liveoneggs wrote: post #3

(tangentially related to this article) I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it. The code that makes it to five years is extraordinary as most of it "dies" before reaching the eighteen month mark. As a result I have recently been shifting my view to support replace-ability vs maintainability whenever possi…

This is a product short tenures: software developers switch jobs every 18 months on average, so they don't get to see the long-term effects of their decisions. This leads to decisions with big payoffs in the short term that come back to bite you in the long term. Some examples:

1. Pervasive, maximal frameworks that favor terse magic over clear explicitness. At first this allows you to spin up a website in a few lines of code, but years down the line you're spending all your time reverse-engineering a workaround for a bug in Ember 0.2 so you can implement the same functionality in Ember 17.3 when the controller that it referred to is no longer in the codebase and the naming convention for tying together models and views has changed twice.

2. 0.x versioned libraries which solve the problem you have today, but cause 100 problems tomorrow when the maintainer deletes the repo.

3. Global state, which lets you bypass having to pass data through to components until later when you want to have more than one component per page.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#87

Post by artursapek »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #49
artursapek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why I roll my eyes when devs passionately argue in favor of "consistent code style" and spend hours of their lives manually linting their code. What's the point? It will be gone next year.

Relevant smbc: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2461

How is that relevant

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#88

Post by Pica_soO »

liveoneggs wrote: post #3

(tangentially related to this article) I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it. The code that makes it to five years is extraordinary as most of it "dies" before reaching the eighteen month mark. As a result I have recently been shifting my view to support replace-ability vs maintainability whenever possi…

Congratulations, you are one short step away from realizing, that replace-ability for their own software is the least thing any company wants.

There are many ways into the walled gardens, but none out.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#89

Post by Rovanion »

saltyworker wrote: post #85
nightski wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you need a sexy word is indicative of the problem.

The fact that you need a sexy word is indicative of _human nature_

I'm not sure that can be said with certainty, perhaps it is cultural.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#90

Post by HillaryBriss »

>The American Society of Civil Engineers considers 17 percent of American dams to be “high hazard potential,” including the one outside Oroville, Calif., that nearly collapsed in February.

Is this exaggeration? Would any reasonable person say that the Oroville dam nearly collapsed?

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