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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   1885 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 1, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm in my 40s and believe I'm finally hitting my stride as a young cranky old man. What did it?

Working at a company full of Python developers using Google Cloud.

OMFG I do not care about

  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • cloud triggers
  • Celery jobs
  • Python in general
  • anything that ends with .yaml
  • Docker

It's not because I don't know these technologies and can't handle it. It's because they're stupid. They seem like they were some half-baked approach done by someone barely competent at the task they were given and bam they're now the industry standard and we all need to use it and everyone frowns at you like you're an idiot if you think people shouldn't be forced to huff that original barely competent developer's farts all day every day.

Well, fuck that and fuck you if you agree with them. We should not tolerate the simplest things taking 100ms (or 5 seconds) or taking 100MB (or gigabytes) or 10 approved PRs.

I'm going knee-jerk write everything I possibly can in C++ from now on. I'm pushing straight to main prod. I don't care if it's not memory safe or difficult to reason about or not "best practice". I will use indomitable volition to solve the problem and when I do it'll be so much faster and I get to really dig in and be cranky and old and superior. Behold, this actually takes only 50 micros and uses 5MB of RAM and the Hertzner server costs 1/10th and the overall cost is 1/100th and this is right and good and just. While you're entering day three debugging some inscrutable GCP error I'm shipping.

I am elite and I know how computers work and this is how you do it. Sorry if you can't keep up, young whipper snapper :sunglasses: :muscle_arm: :smug_smirking_face:

Get. Off. My. Lawn.

While you're entering day three debugging some inscrutable GCP error I'm shipping.

But are you? My experience has been k8s makes shipping - and by that I don't mean compiling the code (or whatever people do to package python apps in your country) and throwing it over the fence for some other people to figure out how to run it, but actually creating a viable product consumable over the long periods of time by the end user - way smoother than any solution before it. Sure, I can build a 50-component system from the base OS up and manage all the configs and dependencies manually. Once. When I need to do it many times over and maintain it - in parallel to debugging bugs and developing new code - I say fuck it, I need something that automates it. It's not even the fun part. Yes, it means I'll pay the price in pure speed. If I were in a hedge fund doing HFT, I wouldn't pay it. 99% of places I've seen it's prudent to pay it. My time and my mental health is more valuable than CPU time. Not always, but often.

And not just for you the original coder either. When I’m brought in on a project, the first step really shouldn’t be ‘reinstall your OS so it’s compatible with the libraries we use’.

Yeah that's another aspect. When you graduate from "one man band" to development team, and from development team to 20 teams each of them doing their own thing and needing to coordinate and figure out how not to step on each other toes, turns out hyper-smart CPU-optimal solutions are very rarely the best ones. You need common languages and solutions that can be made reusable and portable. Otherwise the undomitable volition solution needs to be thrown out and redone, because however good is whoever wrote it, he is not very scalable. There were times where lone heroes could single-handedly win battles, by their sheer will and awesomeness, and it's very romantic. But modern battles are never won that way.

I will push back slightly against ‘never’. Comma.ai was pretty much a one-man self-driving solution and that was on part with the big boys for motorway driving. Likewise Palmer Luckey invented modern VR pretty much single handedly. But it’s rare and usually only happens within niches the mainstream hasn't noticed are viable.

OK maybe never is going too far. I'm not saying one-man band can't compete necessarily. In some cases, with the man being particularly awesome, it can happen in a particular place at a particular time. But scaling this to a company of hundreds of people would be absolutely impossible, because one person can not communicate effectively with hundreds, it's just physically not possible. One person or small number of persons can not be the bottleneck. And super-clever solutions would necessarily make them the bottleneck. It's either one-man band (maybe with a limited cast of janitorial staff) or a scalable corporation, but not both. And for some niches, being small is fine, but most businesses want to grow. And, very frequently, those who do grow eat up those who don't.

Agreed.

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