As an aside, I recall the early days when @SwiftOnSecurity was purposely ambiguous about the distinction between the artist Taylor Swift and their technology tweets. It was delicious to see confused responses.
At some point it changed. Not sure what triggered that. I have a vague memory of a stroke, but I might be misremembering.
im convinced most developers spend more time working on making shit work, rather than actually writing code and bugfixing it.
edit: this was mostly a shitpost, and i was expecting some flack, but i got basically none. Can we have a real moment here. Are you guys doing ok? Who made you do this to yourselves?
ok, real talk over, we’re going back to suffering now.
Yup. Thats just enterprise software for you. Something was made requiremnts changed, and then changed again and then ypu have duct tape on top of a duct tape with a duct tape holding those duct tapes and a touch of super glu here and there. Also ducttapes are microscopic in size but the sheer quantity of them is unimaginable.
this part is pretty much expected i think. But i’m starting to see it cropping up into the more meta aspects of programming now. For instance, apps being shipped with existing deprecated packages. Seems like it’s also creeping a little further into the more UI aspects of it as well.
Because software devs have the weeks/months to learn vulkan every time they want to use a GUI for their job, or to learn compiler design whenever they wanna use java for their job
As someone who has written a DB handle… that shit is hard, I had to be extremely careful to protect against SQL injection. Everyone rolling their own is how we return to the Era of XSS and SQL Injection on every website. I’d prefer to have young devs use libraries and contribute as they gain knowledge.
They do… but the road to naturally learning that lesson comes with the cost of enabling botnets and destroying businesses. Maybe there should be a qualification exam to be a developer but when there isn’t we need to make sure more junior developers have the best tools they can get to fight against foot guns.
Also, on the topic of security, a lot of good senior level developers don’t have the specialized knowledge to do shit like build a password validation system that isn’t vulnerable to a timing attack or know what a timing attack is…
And timezones, fuck timezones, I’ve written code that correctly handled timezones (and subsequently threw it away when Canada decided to DST on a different weekend). Imagine how shitty it’d be if we constantly had to reinvent the wheel when it came to timezones.
Oh, and forget about databases… do you know how fucking hard it is to write an ACID compliant WAL? The reason postgres is the default open source database (and why so many databases are just layers built on top of postgres’s engine) is because it’s fucking hard. Mongo still (IIRC) has consistency issues, they were a tech darling for half a decade and can’t manage to NoSQL as well as Postgres.
Also, good luck building a GUI with anything more complicated than curses style box art characters.
I started mildly disagreeing with you but I disagree even more that I’ve thought about other tools people would need to roll on their own.
a lot of good senior level developers don’t have the specialized knowledge to do shit like build a password validation system that isn’t vulnerable to a timing attack or know what a timing attack is
No Microsoft Access is/was a GUI software actually meant to have databases instead of how everyone uses Excel/spreadsheets as databases. It is a part of the office suite. It works pretty much like traditional databases but has an easier to access GUI for non programmers I guess. I don’t think it’s used a ton nowadays except for legacy processes that haven’t been updated.
No its microsofts database GUI program that’s part of Microsoft Office . imagine software made for users who have a vague understanding of SQL and visual basic but then an exec. forced the designers and devs to make it accessible to everyone while giving them barely any teamembers causing a fuckton of technical debt and unintuitive quirks , making anyone who opens the software feel like they have just been placed in a highly equipped tank , in front of a wall of unlabeled levers and told to drive the tank , or at least that’s how I view it.
(reposting from another account sorry if you see both comments)
We use it at work for it’s actual intended purpose: as a small database that isn’t customer facing. It’s used and maintained by nontechnical staff to keep data about equipment (slot machines).
It would be too much info for excel, but it’s not enough to really need anything more.
We’ve been spending decades curating our perception by management in order to make sure we all have jobs. He’s gonna ruin the whole industry if we don’t shut him the hell up
Does (or does not) he get the credit for committing the fraud that kept Tesla in business long enough to popularize* electric cars that there are other companies at which to build them?
He’s a piece of shit but he restarted the Space Race that was literally dying, push the industry into electric cars when none of them were willing to do it. His actual products may be garbage but it doesn’t stop that it started the movements that needed to happen in the industry.
To say that he contributed nothing at all is unfortunately false as much as I may hate the man
They do the same thing building architects do. They draw pretty pictures of the end product that may of may not be structurally sound, then rely on engineers to build it and make sure it doesn’t collapse.
I tried to get a software architect to explain their job to me once, it was like a “lean startup”, a libertarian, and a psychic had written an elevator pitch together.
I disagree with not needing dedicated architects at least once you reach a certain size. If there are 50 plus developers working on a dozen or more projects there’s a large communication cost to stay on top of everything.
I always saw architects roles in modern development being the person trying to find synergies between different teams andcoordinateing them working with each other.
Like if some team makes a sick project for managing streams of data streams the architect should be promoting it for other teams to leverage.
That’s one role, as a software architect I also often served as the sunk cost fallacy bad news delivery system. It’s a good idea to keep some eyes from outside your team on your project just to do the occasional sensibility check.
There is also a large responsibility to make sure different teams are well coordinated and not building the system in directly opposing directions. It really fucking sucks to have your work, as a developer, invalidated by someone else’s work suddenly without any warning.
The good ones: design and adjust software development processes, standards for cross-project functionality and reusability and in general try and improve at a high level the process of making, maintaining and improving software in a company.
The bad ones: junior/mid-level software design with a thick layer of bullshit on top to spin it as advanced stuff.
If you want to see bad software architecture, just look at most of Google’s frameworks and libraries.
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