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The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

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Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#81

Post by deltarholamda »

I've had similar crises of faith every now and then. I never got into Docker, and every time I read somebody's K8s horror story I get hives. I begrudgingly learned enough about systemd so I wouldn't become a hermit, but I'm not happy about it. I still more or less prefer to do Web things without the SPA-like features.

Some of this is because this is what I know, but some of it is because I'm too dumb to see the benefits of the added complexity. I'm not going to do "WEBSCALE!" things, more than likely, so why not just run a FreeBSD server and, if needed, stand up a jail here and there. Chasing the tech rabbit can be fun, but it is also exhausting.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#82

Post by agentultra »

You’re not too stupid, nobody is. If you need to learn it, you can, and you will. Some things are hard to learn but it’s worth it because they help us do things we couldn’t otherwise.

As others have pointed out: don’t use k8s to deploy a web app for your local soccer team. All of the suggestions in this article are fine.

It’s actually kind of smart.

Update: ... except the REST/HTTP part. It doesn't matter for a small friends-and-family website, sure. But if you're building something you want to have grow and stick around and be used by others you'll just be setting yourself up for problems down the line. I dunno why RPC has come back into vogue, it was a pain in the 90s and early aughts that I had hoped we'd abandoned. It doesn't play well with the wider web ecosystem, it's a pain to grow horizontally, and locks you out of some pretty neat tools that can take your website further as you grow without much effort.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#83

Post by BizarreByte »

memefrog wrote: post #15

This post is the programmer equivalent of teenage girls posting photos of themselves captioned with "I'm so ugly" to farm praise from their friends. I have come to dislike this growing trend that celebrates mediocrity and failure. Posting proudly that you are stupid, terrible and incompetent seems to result in applause and high praise. Why? Why is that a good thing? I hope this was intended to be a parody.

I don't think it's hard to see why people have this reaction when they're inundated with people who are better than they will ever be on social media and sites like HN.

Not everyone can be the best and this seriously affects some people's self confidence, especially when they see the best around every corner.

In 2023 it's not good enough to be good enough, at least not if you believe what the people on the internet have to say so folks rebel against such things.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#84

Post by AMerrit »

Some of the things in this are a bit much, but I think some of this comes from the cult of the 10x developer. I feel like I'm a 10x developer on some very specific things, and a 0.5x developer when it comes to others, but that I'm mostly an average 1x dev. I think a lot of devs are like this, they get really good at some specific stuff, but feel lost as soon as they start looking at some new project on a totally different stack or in a different area. Like when I first migrated to using git from svn I definitely had a productivity drop from screwing stuff up, but I eventually adjusted. Most devs I know went through something similar, shot themselves in the foot a few times and then acclimatized to the new tool, not many instantly switched without a productivity drop.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#85

Post by mattdeboard »

chrisldgk wrote: post #9
chrisldgk wrote: post #7

It’s important to keep in mind that pretty much all the techniques you’re too „stupid“ for all aren’t necessities for small projects, but rather being able to manage complexity (or workload) at scale. For an MVP or a small product, keeping with the simpler techniques is absolutely fine, and adhering to those standards in many cases can even be considered overengineering. Though there’s one thing I take issue with. „I…

By which I mean „I don’t have the time to learn X“ would be more precise, even if less catchy for a HN headline

It's a rhetorical device

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#87

Post by javajosh »

memefrog wrote: post #15

This post is the programmer equivalent of teenage girls posting photos of themselves captioned with "I'm so ugly" to farm praise from their friends. I have come to dislike this growing trend that celebrates mediocrity and failure. Posting proudly that you are stupid, terrible and incompetent seems to result in applause and high praise. Why? Why is that a good thing? I hope this was intended to be a parody.

>I have come to dislike this growing trend that celebrates mediocrity and failure.

That's not what this is. It's a sarcastic critique of techniques the author thinks don't justify their weight. It's a comment on the cognitive load required by the plethora of complex "best practices" that often goes without questioning.

The multi-repo microservices thing really hit home for me. I only recently had to deal with this, and it was horrible. I finally made my peace with it, but it required adding an entirely unnecessary level of abstraction and techniques where merges are the new commits, and repos are the new directories, and so on. And each service was 90% boilerplate and like one endpoint with a few hundred lines of code.

Ultimately I think reducing the coginitive load of your devs, and making the build-test-debug loop fast, is the highest goal of project leadership, but I seem to be in the minority. If you don't like the "stupid" verbiage, I think one benchmark for a successful system should be usable by devs who are mildly drunk.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#88

Post by [deleted] »

memefrog wrote: post #15

This post is the programmer equivalent of teenage girls posting photos of themselves captioned with "I'm so ugly" to farm praise from their friends. I have come to dislike this growing trend that celebrates mediocrity and failure. Posting proudly that you are stupid, terrible and incompetent seems to result in applause and high praise. Why? Why is that a good thing? I hope this was intended to be a parody.

[deleted]

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#89

Post by quickthrower2 »

benjaminmikiten wrote: post #29

For someone who's "too stupid" to understand these techs, they certainly can explain them and their drawbacks and alternatives well. This reminds me of a bit of advice from Austin Kleon that I've used frequently -- "Make bad art, too"[^1]: > “Good” can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What’s important is to get your ha…

For a side project I used some PHP to get a job done. Why? because you can edit the file on the server and keep trying it out till it works. On 90s style hosting that is cheap and honest. The iteration speed is amazing. CI/CD took <100ms.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#90

Post by Parmenidea »

CM30 wrote: post #35

Honestly, the truly 'smart' programmer isn't someone who does or doesn't use a bunch of techniques or best practices, it's the one who can look at the situation and do what's right for that particular project/job. Most of the things in this post could be the right answer if the project is a weekend side project that's going to get a few hundred views a month, or a website for a small business. Bob's Restaurant doesn'…

How would you host the Bob’s Restaurant website?
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