9 ms·

I don't like the new way of doing things. Kubernetes, node, react, terraform... Everything is more complicated and also more fragile. I feel like the softwar

I don't like the new way of doing things. Kubernetes, node, react, terraform... Everything is more complicated and also more fragile. I feel like the software world is collectively mad and I'm sitting on the outside asking "wtf is going on?" Or maybe I'm the crazy one.

amorphous 8y ago
Certainly not crazy. I started programming on a VC-20 doing basic and later assembler. Just this for years. Glorious times. What helps a little is to go deep into the history of computer programming and see the big picture. The fundamental problems defined in the 30s ~ 50s are still very much relevant. Kubernates, node, react etc are just ripples.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Or maybe I'm the crazy one. If you are then you aren't the only one. A lot of this stuff seems to spill out of companies like Google or Facebook and I'm sure it makes sense at their scale. For most of us we just don't have the same problems and are probably better off avoiding it.
Tade0 8y ago
Less than two days ago lerna left-padded out of being FLOSS and since Babel uses lerna we're having this conversation now: https://github.com/babel/babel/issues/8579#issuecomment-416968197 https://github.com/babel/babel/issues/8579#issuecomment-4169... I pine for the times when we could just place a few <script> tags here and there and call it a day.
- exikyut 8y ago
  Whoa, this is awesome. (I mean that half-sarcastically in a "you must go and see, you won't believe it" kind of way.) I'll cherry-pick these comments, which I think have the best signal/flame ratio: > ... > this doesn't seem safe anymore. this stack has too many individuals with no oversight in charge > i really wish the javascript community would start seeing unnecessary tooling as a vulnerability > this happens so often in this language IMO you could totally s/the javascript community/everyone/ here, obviously not for universal values of "everyone" but certainly for many.
  - Tade0 8y ago
    Whoa, this is awesome. (I mean that half-sarcastically in a "you must go and see, you won't believe it" kind of way.) It definitely inspires awe. I mean, what am I supposed to make of this? https://github.com/palantir/tslint/issues/4141#issuecomment-416773459 https://github.com/palantir/tslint/issues/4141#issuecomment-...
    - exikyut 8y ago
      O...kay...! Wow. That did it; I fired off a report to GH, just to be sure. I decided some of my text veered somewhat off-topic, so didn't send the whole thing. Here's what I said, including the offtopic bit after the 2nd "---". --- Hi! You've probably gotten a few reports about this by this point, so this is just a redundant make-sure. https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1616 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1616 is a pull request that changed the license of a project with 11k stars and which (IIUC) is also a common Babel dependency. The license change basically extended the MIT to say "but this license expressly forbids the following random list of companies from using this" blah blah. (I don't think this person realizes GitHub is owned by Microsoft...) The rationalization was very political. The whole debacle got reverted fairly quickly by https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633, and the user was removed from the project. Yay (and whew)! The license in question can be found in the user in question's repo, https://github.com/jamiebuilds/license https://github.com/jamiebuilds/license, and it currently has 53 stars. I think it only had 20-30 yesterday. :/ Today, I woke up to https://github.com/palantir/tslint/issues/4141#issuecomment-416773459 https://github.com/palantir/tslint/issues/4141#issuecomment-..., which is reasonably inflammatory. I have no idea what gets done in situations like this, and will watch with great interest. I say this honestly; I found this over at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17872475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17872475 while reading a _completely_ unrelated topic, I have no association/involvement/investment in/with the project. --- There are 1001 interpretations of course. Mine is that this person may be driving themselves into a frenzy of sorts with more and more outlandish actions. I hope I'm wrong! But unfortunately, because of the scale of the internet, the small number of people that are voicing their agreement with this person's views is large enough that it looks like this person has become completely convinced their mental models are accurate and well-founded. On the one hand, the above is my rationalization for why I thought it might be a good idea to mute this user's account for a few days. I have nothing against them, but thought that maybe the chance to quieten down would mean they might not harm themselves or others, which I definitely would not want to happen. On the other hand, I've realized that there's nothing to stop this user using email or Slack or whatever else to continue communicating so muting wouldn't have such an isolating (and hopefully calming) effect at all, and (as so often happens with banhammer situations) would instead probably rile them up and make them 1000x worse. So from a "quiet time" standpoint that wouldn't work at all. :( --- I saw the 2nd block above is relevant but unneeded reading / commentary.
- juancampa 8y ago
  This just in! They reverted the license change. Go back to work.
  - juancampa 8y ago
    Here's the revert btw: https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633
brassattax 8y ago
Here here! VB and Windows Explorer "devops" all the way!
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
No, I'm pretty sure we're not crazy. I think a lot of the tech world has been taken over by technology fetishists, people who worship complexity for the sake of it.
abledon 8y ago
I’m playing with the idea of quitting software , getting a softskills excel/MS word gov job for equal pay then only programming on spare time in elixir and tensor flow for fun side side projects —- current web dev environment is ridiculous !
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  If you think this stuff is frustrating wait until you have to deal with government bureaucracy.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  Right? You could still do interesting work, solve problems - but the landscape isn't changing overnight every night, you have the mental resources to learn things you actually want to learn instead of things for work... Not a bad deal. The only reason I got into web dev were what it offered me as far as ability to make things. But the work itself? I'm just as happy writing reports vs refactoring a test suit. Rails makes software fun for me, I would not have gotten into web dev if i thought React was how things are done.
- justboxing 8y ago
  > getting a softskills excel/MS word gov job for equal pay This is a great idea ( I sincerely mean it), and I too have been toying with this. Gov programming jobs are also very cushy. The knock on them ( / "cons" ) until recently was that they pay very less, almost 40% less, and that it's full of old people. But that has changed -- atleast in San Francisco and Bay Area where I live. Esp the City of San Francisco tech jobs[1] are quite interesting and many use modern tech. On top of that almost all Govt jobs accrue pension at the rate of 3% of your gross / year, so if you work 17 years or so you can get 50% of your highest salary at retirement. The con I see is that the process to get hired is very tedious and involves lots of applications and moves very slowly. I was plesantly surprised to see Sr. Software Engineer jobs that were paying anywhere from 110K to 130K [2] -- all govt jobs have to disclose salary or rate range in JD --, which is not to far off from the average in this area for non-FAANG / non-Startup type job. [1] SF City Tech Jobs => https://www.jobapscloud.com/SF/?Keyword=&Loc=&DeptNumber=&OccList=1000&JobType=&KeywordFullText=0#SearchForm https://www.jobapscloud.com/SF/?Keyword=&Loc=&DeptNumber=&Oc... [2] Source / Example: IS Programmer Analyst Principal: Notice salary Range of $105,794 - $133,094/yr in desc. https://jobapscloud.com/SF/sup/bulpreview.asp?R1=PEX&R2=1064&R3=075532 https://jobapscloud.com/SF/sup/bulpreview.asp?R1=PEX&R2=1064...
hackinthebochs 8y ago
You're not the only one. I love programming but I very much dislike being a software developer. The bait and switch is real.
deathanatos 8y ago
This is interesting. While I'm going preface most of these tools with having not used them to their full extent, to me, they still seem to solve very real world problems: Kubernetes: I've actually not used kubernetes yet; I do hope to, sometime in the future. I do see the value in managing distributing the images/code required for a job to the machine that will eventually execute it, and distributing jobs automatically, as opposed to by hand. I've worked with a system similar to Kubernetes, and having used it, I understand the appeal and miss it greatly. Docker images (which I understand Kubernetes to use) also greatly simplify my life as a developer; generally, the actual VM my stuff is deployed to is significantly out of date (e.g., it's CentOS or Ubuntu) and this allows me to, e.g., get a very recent version of Python 3. It greatly pushes one toward (IMO) not having snowflake (unique, hand-crafted, but can't lose them) machines. Node: I don't use Node server side; I mostly use npm for managing fetching client-side dependencies. Otherwise, this would be either committing them directly (I dislike mixing third-party and first-party code; it encourages ad-hoc fixes/changes, and doesn't get updated regularly) or a bash script to fetch them (more painful to maintain in the long run than npm, IMO). It also fetches indirect dependencies, so I don't need to figure out that this project requires that dependency, etc. Also, Babel is a godsend of a tool for dealing with browsers that haven't implemented the latest ECMAScript features. In particular, JavaScript modules are wonderful compared to life without. React: I've not used full react; I've actually not used it at all for lack of time. I would like to use it, as building up UI elements via the DOM APIs is downright painful. Having not used JSX at all, I can completely understand why someone would invent JSX. Terraform: We didn't use this for a while. AWS resources where managed by hand; nobody would know why something was in a particular configuration, and configurations between production and non-production environments would be different, with no clear rationale as the why. TF at least allows comments and a history of changes (when version controlled), and the language helps keeps things consistent where they should be.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  For every one of of the things there is a simpler approach that not only works, but is more robust and will better serve smaller projects. It's not that they don't solve problems, but that there are different perspectives of the problem space entirely - often exceeding simply technical justifications and taking a larger look at it. If you've got a kubernetes problem, go for it. But there is a lot of value in simplicity too.
Mizza 8y ago
So much of this. React is like one step forwards, 10 steps backwards. Mixing markup and logic, adding a whole front-end compiler, needing imports from third parties to re-implement basic browser functionality - for what? So that users have to see a loading spinner and their back button doesn't work any more? I'm 90% sure it's an accidental conspiracy to keep front end developer salaries high. Talking to older heads, apparently they felt the same way when XML and "middleware" came along..
- meesterdude 8y ago
  It's really helpful to hear that i'm not alone with this. My troubles with picking up and buying into react has not sat well with me, but seeing someone else say what i've been thinking is a huge relief.
- jmcgough 8y ago
  React is most useful if you have really complex state that you're trying to manage and reason about. It's probably overused because people who don't need it are just doing whatever's trendy without understanding trade-offs, but it's a godsend for UIs that need hundreds of components, persistent state, etc. IMO people often add Redux to it before a project really needs it. There's no need to mix markup and logic, a good pattern is to have dumb components that just translate state into markup, and keep your logic elsewhere. Modern javascript (and typescript) is a joy to program in and has greatly improved my productivity. Having to compile it with babel is a small price to pay.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Modern JavaScript is better than old JavaScript, but it’s still JS, and I’m missing basically all features from other languages that make programming great.
- corsivo 8y ago
  SSR and PushState have prevented your "for whats?" from being real issues ever. Mixing markup and logic along with not capturing benefits from the transpiler are more symptoms of poor implementation decisions rather than flaws with the actual tool.
PerfectElement 8y ago
Same here. I'm hoping to retire by selling my current SaaS business (which uses vanilla ASP.NET/Web API/IIS) so I don't have to get back in the market and learn the new way of doing things.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  I can totally sympathize - but there's a lot out there, and more than one way to do things - especially on the web. That's what makes it such a great platform! Would you want to code in your retirement, or do you plan on hanging up your keyboard?
  - PerfectElement 8y ago
    I will definitely code, but without the pressure of making money or scaling or using the latest JS framework.
Aeolun 8y ago
Ah, I recognize this. All these things are cool, amazing, and great proof of concepts, but building a production application on them just feels like hubris.
ryandrake 8y ago
“When your only tool is a 150 node cluster...” As an old school embedded programmer, I’ve stopped trying to even figure out how many layers of abstraction, data transfer and transformation, business rules, and libraries are between the user and the metal in modern software. Nobody values small and concise anymore. Big and complicated pays the paychecks.
wetpaste 8y ago
This is just some MVP java app with an nginx proxy, elastic-search, and mysql? Why is this running in k8s on aws via Kops in conjunction with a cloudformation template for aurora inside of a VPC? With containers separately built via packer +ansible kicked off via jenkins after each pull request merge? The CI pipeline also kicks off a canary deployment in our UAT environment with a prometheus exporter for monitoring on our grafana dashboard and if you want to see logs you have to look at our ELK stack for that and if you want to do any debugging we have Jaeger for tracing across our service mesh which is based on Istio using Calico as a network overlay. All that for an app does some crappy knock-off of trello.
- Pr3fix 8y ago
  Please, someone, make an HN-ipsum generator. This is a perfect source.
- yahyaheee 8y ago
  rofl, it sounds pretty bad when you put it like that. I think what we’ve been doing in software for sometime has been complex, were just beginning to draw more lines as we learn more
- newsbinator 8y ago
  I'd prefer to pretend that some of those names are made up, but I know they're not.
  - autotune 8y ago
    DevOops Consultant here, all of those technologies are 100 percent on point and heavily used. Also random fun fact, every time a stack includes CloudFormation, it brings the owner of said stack slightly closer to becoming an alcoholic.
- madushan1000 8y ago
  I dunno, I think it's a pretty neat stack. At least you don't have to deal with OSGI and the works. In all seriousness though, please don't build things on k8s unless you have a couple of microservices or the infrastructure in place already.
digitalzombie 8y ago
Bro I feel the same way Kubernetes is so fragile. Docker have gone along way but Kubernetes they need more and more version. I feel as I get older I'm more incline to wait a few version for the bugs to be fix and the api to be solidified. The majority of the software out there that come out with version 1 is just marketing to get people to adopt it and they work out the kink as they go on.
bg4 8y ago
You're not alone in this thought. We developers are dopamine junkies chasing complexity to get our fix.
interfixus 8y ago
I'm outside that perimeter, too. And I suspect you and I may not necessarily be the only ones. They tell me that on the inside, there's actually a project or too where horrendous complexity is unavoidable and hence in order. As for the vast majority, they're just happily running in circles - or probably some infinitely more complex geometric abstractions - creating endlessly escalating cycles of work for each other. To your list, I would add Docker. I fucking hate that all-pervading obfuscator.
ternaryoperator 8y ago
You're not the only crazy one, or even crazy at all. Even before the technologies you mention, devs were complaining [1] about how the non-innate aspects of software development had overwhelmed the joy of writing code. [1] http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/just-let-me-code/240168735 http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/just-let-me-code/240168735
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Yup. It's like this huge bureaucracy we've created for ourselves. You can't just run code on a target platform, you have to learn about all the thousands new forms to fill, and then fill them all in triplicate.

amorphous 8y ago

Certainly not crazy. I started programming on a VC-20 doing basic and later assembler. Just this for years. Glorious times. What helps a little is to go deep into the history of computer programming and see the big picture. The fundamental problems defined in the 30s ~ 50s are still very much relevant. Kubernates, node, react etc are just ripples.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago

Or maybe I'm the crazy one. If you are then you aren't the only one. A lot of this stuff seems to spill out of companies like Google or Facebook and I'm sure it makes sense at their scale. For most of us we just don't have the same problems and are probably better off avoiding it.

Tade0 8y ago

Less than two days ago lerna left-padded out of being FLOSS and since Babel uses lerna we're having this conversation now: https://github.com/babel/babel/issues/8579#issuecomment-416968197 https://github.com/babel/babel/issues/8579#issuecomment-4169... I pine for the times when we could just place a few <script> tags here and there and call it a day.

exikyut 8y ago
Whoa, this is awesome. (I mean that half-sarcastically in a "you must go and see, you won't believe it" kind of way.) I'll cherry-pick these comments, which I think have the best signal/flame ratio: > ... > this doesn't seem safe anymore. this stack has too many individuals with no oversight in charge > i really wish the javascript community would start seeing unnecessary tooling as a vulnerability > this happens so often in this language IMO you could totally s/the javascript community/everyone/ here, obviously not for universal values of "everyone" but certainly for many.
- Tade0 8y ago
  Whoa, this is awesome. (I mean that half-sarcastically in a "you must go and see, you won't believe it" kind of way.) It definitely inspires awe. I mean, what am I supposed to make of this? https://github.com/palantir/tslint/issues/4141#issuecomment-416773459 https://github.com/palantir/tslint/issues/4141#issuecomment-...
  - exikyut 8y ago
    O...kay...! Wow. That did it; I fired off a report to GH, just to be sure. I decided some of my text veered somewhat off-topic, so didn't send the whole thing. Here's what I said, including the offtopic bit after the 2nd "---". --- Hi! You've probably gotten a few reports about this by this point, so this is just a redundant make-sure. https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1616 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1616 is a pull request that changed the license of a project with 11k stars and which (IIUC) is also a common Babel dependency. The license change basically extended the MIT to say "but this license expressly forbids the following random list of companies from using this" blah blah. (I don't think this person realizes GitHub is owned by Microsoft...) The rationalization was very political. The whole debacle got reverted fairly quickly by https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633, and the user was removed from the project. Yay (and whew)! The license in question can be found in the user in question's repo, https://github.com/jamiebuilds/license https://github.com/jamiebuilds/license, and it currently has 53 stars. I think it only had 20-30 yesterday. :/ Today, I woke up to https://github.com/palantir/tslint/issues/4141#issuecomment-416773459 https://github.com/palantir/tslint/issues/4141#issuecomment-..., which is reasonably inflammatory. I have no idea what gets done in situations like this, and will watch with great interest. I say this honestly; I found this over at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17872475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17872475 while reading a _completely_ unrelated topic, I have no association/involvement/investment in/with the project. --- There are 1001 interpretations of course. Mine is that this person may be driving themselves into a frenzy of sorts with more and more outlandish actions. I hope I'm wrong! But unfortunately, because of the scale of the internet, the small number of people that are voicing their agreement with this person's views is large enough that it looks like this person has become completely convinced their mental models are accurate and well-founded. On the one hand, the above is my rationalization for why I thought it might be a good idea to mute this user's account for a few days. I have nothing against them, but thought that maybe the chance to quieten down would mean they might not harm themselves or others, which I definitely would not want to happen. On the other hand, I've realized that there's nothing to stop this user using email or Slack or whatever else to continue communicating so muting wouldn't have such an isolating (and hopefully calming) effect at all, and (as so often happens with banhammer situations) would instead probably rile them up and make them 1000x worse. So from a "quiet time" standpoint that wouldn't work at all. :( --- I saw the 2nd block above is relevant but unneeded reading / commentary.
juancampa 8y ago
This just in! They reverted the license change. Go back to work.
- juancampa 8y ago
  Here's the revert btw: https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633

brassattax 8y ago

Here here! VB and Windows Explorer "devops" all the way!

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

No, I'm pretty sure we're not crazy. I think a lot of the tech world has been taken over by technology fetishists, people who worship complexity for the sake of it.

abledon 8y ago

I’m playing with the idea of quitting software , getting a softskills excel/MS word gov job for equal pay then only programming on spare time in elixir and tensor flow for fun side side projects —- current web dev environment is ridiculous !

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
If you think this stuff is frustrating wait until you have to deal with government bureaucracy.
meesterdude 8y ago
Right? You could still do interesting work, solve problems - but the landscape isn't changing overnight every night, you have the mental resources to learn things you actually want to learn instead of things for work... Not a bad deal. The only reason I got into web dev were what it offered me as far as ability to make things. But the work itself? I'm just as happy writing reports vs refactoring a test suit. Rails makes software fun for me, I would not have gotten into web dev if i thought React was how things are done.
justboxing 8y ago
> getting a softskills excel/MS word gov job for equal pay This is a great idea ( I sincerely mean it), and I too have been toying with this. Gov programming jobs are also very cushy. The knock on them ( / "cons" ) until recently was that they pay very less, almost 40% less, and that it's full of old people. But that has changed -- atleast in San Francisco and Bay Area where I live. Esp the City of San Francisco tech jobs[1] are quite interesting and many use modern tech. On top of that almost all Govt jobs accrue pension at the rate of 3% of your gross / year, so if you work 17 years or so you can get 50% of your highest salary at retirement. The con I see is that the process to get hired is very tedious and involves lots of applications and moves very slowly. I was plesantly surprised to see Sr. Software Engineer jobs that were paying anywhere from 110K to 130K [2] -- all govt jobs have to disclose salary or rate range in JD --, which is not to far off from the average in this area for non-FAANG / non-Startup type job. [1] SF City Tech Jobs => https://www.jobapscloud.com/SF/?Keyword=&Loc=&DeptNumber=&OccList=1000&JobType=&KeywordFullText=0#SearchForm https://www.jobapscloud.com/SF/?Keyword=&Loc=&DeptNumber=&Oc... [2] Source / Example: IS Programmer Analyst Principal: Notice salary Range of $105,794 - $133,094/yr in desc. https://jobapscloud.com/SF/sup/bulpreview.asp?R1=PEX&R2=1064&R3=075532 https://jobapscloud.com/SF/sup/bulpreview.asp?R1=PEX&R2=1064...

hackinthebochs 8y ago

You're not the only one. I love programming but I very much dislike being a software developer. The bait and switch is real.

deathanatos 8y ago

This is interesting. While I'm going preface most of these tools with having not used them to their full extent, to me, they still seem to solve very real world problems: Kubernetes: I've actually not used kubernetes yet; I do hope to, sometime in the future. I do see the value in managing distributing the images/code required for a job to the machine that will eventually execute it, and distributing jobs automatically, as opposed to by hand. I've worked with a system similar to Kubernetes, and having used it, I understand the appeal and miss it greatly. Docker images (which I understand Kubernetes to use) also greatly simplify my life as a developer; generally, the actual VM my stuff is deployed to is significantly out of date (e.g., it's CentOS or Ubuntu) and this allows me to, e.g., get a very recent version of Python 3. It greatly pushes one toward (IMO) not having snowflake (unique, hand-crafted, but can't lose them) machines. Node: I don't use Node server side; I mostly use npm for managing fetching client-side dependencies. Otherwise, this would be either committing them directly (I dislike mixing third-party and first-party code; it encourages ad-hoc fixes/changes, and doesn't get updated regularly) or a bash script to fetch them (more painful to maintain in the long run than npm, IMO). It also fetches indirect dependencies, so I don't need to figure out that this project requires that dependency, etc. Also, Babel is a godsend of a tool for dealing with browsers that haven't implemented the latest ECMAScript features. In particular, JavaScript modules are wonderful compared to life without. React: I've not used full react; I've actually not used it at all for lack of time. I would like to use it, as building up UI elements via the DOM APIs is downright painful. Having not used JSX at all, I can completely understand why someone would invent JSX. Terraform: We didn't use this for a while. AWS resources where managed by hand; nobody would know why something was in a particular configuration, and configurations between production and non-production environments would be different, with no clear rationale as the why. TF at least allows comments and a history of changes (when version controlled), and the language helps keeps things consistent where they should be.

meesterdude 8y ago
For every one of of the things there is a simpler approach that not only works, but is more robust and will better serve smaller projects. It's not that they don't solve problems, but that there are different perspectives of the problem space entirely - often exceeding simply technical justifications and taking a larger look at it. If you've got a kubernetes problem, go for it. But there is a lot of value in simplicity too.

Mizza 8y ago

So much of this. React is like one step forwards, 10 steps backwards. Mixing markup and logic, adding a whole front-end compiler, needing imports from third parties to re-implement basic browser functionality - for what? So that users have to see a loading spinner and their back button doesn't work any more? I'm 90% sure it's an accidental conspiracy to keep front end developer salaries high. Talking to older heads, apparently they felt the same way when XML and "middleware" came along..

meesterdude 8y ago
It's really helpful to hear that i'm not alone with this. My troubles with picking up and buying into react has not sat well with me, but seeing someone else say what i've been thinking is a huge relief.
jmcgough 8y ago
React is most useful if you have really complex state that you're trying to manage and reason about. It's probably overused because people who don't need it are just doing whatever's trendy without understanding trade-offs, but it's a godsend for UIs that need hundreds of components, persistent state, etc. IMO people often add Redux to it before a project really needs it. There's no need to mix markup and logic, a good pattern is to have dumb components that just translate state into markup, and keep your logic elsewhere. Modern javascript (and typescript) is a joy to program in and has greatly improved my productivity. Having to compile it with babel is a small price to pay.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Modern JavaScript is better than old JavaScript, but it’s still JS, and I’m missing basically all features from other languages that make programming great.
corsivo 8y ago
SSR and PushState have prevented your "for whats?" from being real issues ever. Mixing markup and logic along with not capturing benefits from the transpiler are more symptoms of poor implementation decisions rather than flaws with the actual tool.

PerfectElement 8y ago

Same here. I'm hoping to retire by selling my current SaaS business (which uses vanilla ASP.NET/Web API/IIS) so I don't have to get back in the market and learn the new way of doing things.

meesterdude 8y ago
I can totally sympathize - but there's a lot out there, and more than one way to do things - especially on the web. That's what makes it such a great platform! Would you want to code in your retirement, or do you plan on hanging up your keyboard?
- PerfectElement 8y ago
  I will definitely code, but without the pressure of making money or scaling or using the latest JS framework.

Aeolun 8y ago

Ah, I recognize this. All these things are cool, amazing, and great proof of concepts, but building a production application on them just feels like hubris.

ryandrake 8y ago

“When your only tool is a 150 node cluster...” As an old school embedded programmer, I’ve stopped trying to even figure out how many layers of abstraction, data transfer and transformation, business rules, and libraries are between the user and the metal in modern software. Nobody values small and concise anymore. Big and complicated pays the paychecks.

wetpaste 8y ago

This is just some MVP java app with an nginx proxy, elastic-search, and mysql? Why is this running in k8s on aws via Kops in conjunction with a cloudformation template for aurora inside of a VPC? With containers separately built via packer +ansible kicked off via jenkins after each pull request merge? The CI pipeline also kicks off a canary deployment in our UAT environment with a prometheus exporter for monitoring on our grafana dashboard and if you want to see logs you have to look at our ELK stack for that and if you want to do any debugging we have Jaeger for tracing across our service mesh which is based on Istio using Calico as a network overlay. All that for an app does some crappy knock-off of trello.

Pr3fix 8y ago
Please, someone, make an HN-ipsum generator. This is a perfect source.
yahyaheee 8y ago
rofl, it sounds pretty bad when you put it like that. I think what we’ve been doing in software for sometime has been complex, were just beginning to draw more lines as we learn more
newsbinator 8y ago
I'd prefer to pretend that some of those names are made up, but I know they're not.
- autotune 8y ago
  DevOops Consultant here, all of those technologies are 100 percent on point and heavily used. Also random fun fact, every time a stack includes CloudFormation, it brings the owner of said stack slightly closer to becoming an alcoholic.
madushan1000 8y ago
I dunno, I think it's a pretty neat stack. At least you don't have to deal with OSGI and the works. In all seriousness though, please don't build things on k8s unless you have a couple of microservices or the infrastructure in place already.

digitalzombie 8y ago

Bro I feel the same way Kubernetes is so fragile. Docker have gone along way but Kubernetes they need more and more version. I feel as I get older I'm more incline to wait a few version for the bugs to be fix and the api to be solidified. The majority of the software out there that come out with version 1 is just marketing to get people to adopt it and they work out the kink as they go on.

bg4 8y ago

You're not alone in this thought. We developers are dopamine junkies chasing complexity to get our fix.

interfixus 8y ago

I'm outside that perimeter, too. And I suspect you and I may not necessarily be the only ones. They tell me that on the inside, there's actually a project or too where horrendous complexity is unavoidable and hence in order. As for the vast majority, they're just happily running in circles - or probably some infinitely more complex geometric abstractions - creating endlessly escalating cycles of work for each other. To your list, I would add Docker. I fucking hate that all-pervading obfuscator.

ternaryoperator 8y ago

You're not the only crazy one, or even crazy at all. Even before the technologies you mention, devs were complaining [1] about how the non-innate aspects of software development had overwhelmed the joy of writing code. [1] http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/just-let-me-code/240168735 http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/just-let-me-code/240168735

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Yup. It's like this huge bureaucracy we've created for ourselves. You can't just run code on a target platform, you have to learn about all the thousands new forms to fill, and then fill them all in triplicate.