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> Because I used AWS Lambda and RDS. Just like people put some PHP scripts on fully hosted Apache+MySQL 20 years ago. This was very common and far easier than

by quonn 6y ago

> Because I used AWS Lambda and RDS. Just like people put some PHP scripts on fully hosted Apache+MySQL 20 years ago. This was very common and far easier than AWS. (And reliable, too, although not as scalable, but the needs then were different). The point being that all of this has been here before. Every few years some complexity creeps back in (in exchange for some other benefits) and then it‘s eliminated again and some progress is made. But works always expands. Recently I helped a friend who is a teacher with her Excel sheets to do grade reports. Pretty well done for Excel, yet it was a terrible user experience. Even if there are only 1000 users, working with this 1 hour per month, a proper custom made software would have been better and easily economically viable. Even no-code has existed for a long time, but it never fits perfectly. Similarly, people regularly complain about just glueing components together. As opposed to what? Copying sorting algorithms right out of a CS class? It‘s a strange idea. Looking at the code I work with, over the years, I find very little glue. True, there are abstractions and sometimes they get in the way. But they are there for a reason. Whether you start out from scratch or use frameworks, much of the application will revolve around business-related data structures. You can give it a try: Take your real-world product, strip out the abstractions, replace the built-in UI widgets, sorting routines, hash tables of your language and maybe that OR-Mapper and your GraphQL-server framework and so on with your custom code and something minimalistic. It won‘t take that much time and code and compared to the stuff on top you‘ll find it‘s not that much that you actually used in the end. Nothing to glue together anymore. Not that it makes sense to do this. But the idea that glueing things together has replaced „real“ development is very much mistaken.

someguyorother 6y ago
>As opposed to what? Copying sorting algorithms right out of a CS class? As opposed to, I'm guessing, adapting Monte-Carlo tree search to Go and inventing AlphaGo. Or what BellKor was doing back in the Netflix Challenge days. Not copying sorting algorithms out of a CS class, but solving a puzzle with a clever new algorithm that just works, and then everything else falls into place. (Call it "if you write it, they will come" taken to its logical conclusion.)
- quonn 6y ago
  You might also notice that none of that is actual product development and it will not lead to a product anytime soon (and as far as I know the Netflix Challenge results were not used by Netflix). That‘s research. It‘s great if you‘re working at a research department or maybe you do it for fun after work. But how is this related, exactly, to the software industry? The point was that actual software engineering has not been more or less trivial than a few decades ago and that the glue isn‘t that much after all. There was never a time when the daily work of software engineers was, in fact, research. There are plenty of research institutes and universities and even research labs of software companies where you can do this after you‘ve got your degree. Just go there, many of my friends are doing exactly that.

by quonn 6y ago

someguyorother 6y ago

>As opposed to what? Copying sorting algorithms right out of a CS class? As opposed to, I'm guessing, adapting Monte-Carlo tree search to Go and inventing AlphaGo. Or what BellKor was doing back in the Netflix Challenge days. Not copying sorting algorithms out of a CS class, but solving a puzzle with a clever new algorithm that just works, and then everything else falls into place. (Call it "if you write it, they will come" taken to its logical conclusion.)

quonn 6y ago
You might also notice that none of that is actual product development and it will not lead to a product anytime soon (and as far as I know the Netflix Challenge results were not used by Netflix). That‘s research. It‘s great if you‘re working at a research department or maybe you do it for fun after work. But how is this related, exactly, to the software industry? The point was that actual software engineering has not been more or less trivial than a few decades ago and that the glue isn‘t that much after all. There was never a time when the daily work of software engineers was, in fact, research. There are plenty of research institutes and universities and even research labs of software companies where you can do this after you‘ve got your degree. Just go there, many of my friends are doing exactly that.