4 ms·

Most development these days is sitting on top of a stack of abstractions, tools, frameworks, and library dependencies of highly varying quality and stability th

Most development these days is sitting on top of a stack of abstractions, tools, frameworks, and library dependencies of highly varying quality and stability that are a couple of dozen layers deep. In this environment where software products and services maniacally duel each other for financial success atop these jenga towers made of jello, no such precision as Vannevar Bush recommends is possible. And it only gets worse from here; more and deeper abstractions are inevitable.

hinkley 6y ago
We excel mostly where there are constraints, like most other creatives.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jcims 6y ago
I was doing some security evaluation work this week on a platform that surfaces information from functional tests of web applications. It had a somewhat obtuse onboarding process so I just copied one of their tutorial applications thinking that would be and easy way to get some data flowing through the tool. Running on Amazon Linux it took nearly two hours for me to descend into the pits of ruby/rvm/node/puppeteer/headless chrome to get the damn thing ‘working’. Broken builds, missing tools, wrong major releases, segfaults, path issues, byzantine environment variable dependencies. I felt like Hal fixing the light bulb and I still have no idea what actually is going on when I run the tests. I just get the API requests I need and the rest feels like a black box in the form of nested Klein bottles. I was really feeling my BOFH oats by the end of it and dismissing everyone that deals with that mess every day as a flock of sadists. I’ve since calmed down and realized that it’s probably not that bad if it actually is your day job. I just know that if I depended on that heap to actually do anything more than run some unit tests I would have years of acclimation in front of me.

4 ms·

Most development these days is sitting on top of a stack of abstractions, tools, frameworks, and library dependencies of highly varying quality and stability th

by ThrowawayR2 6y ago

hinkley 6y ago
We excel mostly where there are constraints, like most other creatives.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jcims 6y ago
I was doing some security evaluation work this week on a platform that surfaces information from functional tests of web applications. It had a somewhat obtuse onboarding process so I just copied one of their tutorial applications thinking that would be and easy way to get some data flowing through the tool. Running on Amazon Linux it took nearly two hours for me to descend into the pits of ruby/rvm/node/puppeteer/headless chrome to get the damn thing ‘working’. Broken builds, missing tools, wrong major releases, segfaults, path issues, byzantine environment variable dependencies. I felt like Hal fixing the light bulb and I still have no idea what actually is going on when I run the tests. I just get the API requests I need and the rest feels like a black box in the form of nested Klein bottles. I was really feeling my BOFH oats by the end of it and dismissing everyone that deals with that mess every day as a flock of sadists. I’ve since calmed down and realized that it’s probably not that bad if it actually is your day job. I just know that if I depended on that heap to actually do anything more than run some unit tests I would have years of acclimation in front of me.