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Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

neilkakkar.com

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Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#91

Post by pmiller2 »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #86
teddyh wrote: post #21

> Naming your clusters? Naming them after the service that runs on them is great, till the point you start running something else on them too. We ended up naming them with our team name. This is covered by RFC 1178¹, Choosing a Name for Your Computer (from 1990): Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine. A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was going to be used to control a nu…

Isn't Cloud-Computing something that should make it unnecessary to name individual computers?

How do you make a service call or ssh into a machine without a name?

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#92

Post by shagie »

teddyh wrote: post #21

> Naming your clusters? Naming them after the service that runs on them is great, till the point you start running something else on them too. We ended up naming them with our team name. This is covered by RFC 1178¹, Choosing a Name for Your Computer (from 1990): Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine. A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was going to be used to control a nu…

The thing I found when naming things was to have as much information packed in the first syllable in a way that was reinforced by all the remaining syllables (that becomes more important when there are a variety of accents in the workplace).

One set of systems I worked on, a team had names based on islands. Two of the test machines were Trinidad and Tobago. Upon hearing the first syllable, it was clear that these were the test machines. Every additional bit beyond tri or tƏ was distinct and reinforcing that the first bit was heard correctly.

They also had boring names like dc2f1a3r1s4 and foo-test1 (depending on who was interested in the machine).

The problem that I've found with names like asfcap1234 is that one has to listen to every piece of information and remember it to properly identify the machine. With every character being important and distinct, there isn't any reinforcement or mnemonic checksum to make sure you've got it right.

I will note that this is from the era of servers (and even before VMs started being the thing).

It is very true that once humans no longer reference the machines by name, the ability to name them becomes less important.

As a counterpoint to RFC 1178, consider RFC 2100 - The Naming of Hosts https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2100

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#93

Post by cjnicholls »

ThrowawayP wrote: post #75
Everlag wrote: post #4

The referenced idea of a 'human log' is great[0]. I started doing something similar 4 years ago and it eventually evolved from per-project notes into a full diary. Being able to search for 'August 24 2016' and know exactly what I did that day is quite powerful. I encourage anyone to take 10 minutes(or 30...) at the end of the day to write up what they've done. Just a text file with minimal formatting has scaled to 2.…

And what does one do when one is struggling with burnout/depression/insomnia and the only legitimate thing to write down is "Not a whole lot really." for days in a row? (A problem a um, ... friend has, of course.) Risky habit to have under those circumstances.

It may be more useful in that case to increase frequency of contributions to the log which will change your objectivity when logging. You may be missing all the small contributary things that lead to achieving a bigger task soon after.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#94

Post by Aeolun »

ThrowawayP wrote: post #75
Everlag wrote: post #4

The referenced idea of a 'human log' is great[0]. I started doing something similar 4 years ago and it eventually evolved from per-project notes into a full diary. Being able to search for 'August 24 2016' and know exactly what I did that day is quite powerful. I encourage anyone to take 10 minutes(or 30...) at the end of the day to write up what they've done. Just a text file with minimal formatting has scaled to 2.…

And what does one do when one is struggling with burnout/depression/insomnia and the only legitimate thing to write down is "Not a whole lot really." for days in a row? (A problem a um, ... friend has, of course.) Risky habit to have under those circumstances.

In that case I guess you should start writing down the 3 good things for that day. Helped me, and it’s fairly positive, even if what you end up with is a string of: ‘Made it through another day’ entries.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#95

Post by pbourke »

lonelappde wrote: post #68
rootusrootus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the last place I worked at (a smaller ISP) we were a little spastic with our naming schemes. Sometimes boring -- web-1, web-2, web-3, web-4, ... and sometimes more entertaining -- we named a cluster of content filtering servers after porn stars (sindee, etc). Now everything is a VM so I'm back to naming "servers" by their function because I don't really need to worry about them being multifunction or evolving.

It's sad to see in the current century that a group of erstwhile professionals jump to "porn stars".

Why is this being downvoted? It is highly inappropriate to do this in a work context.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#96

Post by bluedino »

teddyh wrote: post #21

> Naming your clusters? Naming them after the service that runs on them is great, till the point you start running something else on them too. We ended up naming them with our team name. This is covered by RFC 1178¹, Choosing a Name for Your Computer (from 1990): Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine. A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was going to be used to control a nu…

The only machine we have that's not named poorly, is named DP2950. It was originally a Dell PowerEdge 2950, and we probably had more than one back then, so maybe it wasn't a great name.

Everything else is named based on it's purpose.

www, webapps, data, acccounting, mail, things like that.

But, mail is actually named mailV3 (it's the third hardware the mail server has been on). Why it wasn't just named mail, and if the old one was kept around, it could be mail-old, I don't know.

Then we have our development servers. devel, develv2, www-devel, that kind of stuff. I'd personally prefer devel-whatever the name of the production version is called. Instead we have to thing 'develv2 is actually the development version of dp2950....'

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#97

Post by rbavocadotree »

OJFord wrote: post #81

> in my team culture it’s not frowned upon to “snoop behind” people writing code. Whenever I sensed something interesting going on, I’d roll around and watch what was happening. Agh, I'd hate that. In fact if anything interesting had been going on on my screen it would immediately stop, no way I could work with someone watching. I struggle enough at desks with my back to a door or where people walk by, just can't sto…

It's also strange in that I don't think I'd get very much out of simply watching anyone work, unless they were also giving live commentary or something.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#99

Post by ken »

OJFord wrote: post #81

> in my team culture it’s not frowned upon to “snoop behind” people writing code. Whenever I sensed something interesting going on, I’d roll around and watch what was happening. Agh, I'd hate that. In fact if anything interesting had been going on on my screen it would immediately stop, no way I could work with someone watching. I struggle enough at desks with my back to a door or where people walk by, just can't sto…

I've read that in feng shui what you describe is called the "command position".

I'm not able to work with my back to a crowd. That's a recipe for anxiety. I quit a company when they moved my desk so my back was to a hallway, and refused to compromise on this issue in any way.

Re: Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer

#100

Post by bronxbomber92 »

OJFord wrote: post #81

> in my team culture it’s not frowned upon to “snoop behind” people writing code. Whenever I sensed something interesting going on, I’d roll around and watch what was happening. Agh, I'd hate that. In fact if anything interesting had been going on on my screen it would immediately stop, no way I could work with someone watching. I struggle enough at desks with my back to a door or where people walk by, just can't sto…

We have a similar culture on my team. When I was a junior engineer, being able to poke my head into any open office that sounded like it had an interesting conversation going on was really an invaluable way of learning.
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