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What do you mean by direct? Were you doing the coding? And the backend was larger in what way? And is that a problem? And was the frontend a SPA? Was asp.net ju

What do you mean by direct? Were you doing the coding? And the backend was larger in what way? And is that a problem? And was the frontend a SPA? Was asp.net just used to make a JSON API? What were the actual issues and what would've made it more productive? That's much more useful for discussion here.

javcasas 5y ago
I initially directed (as organise stories, unblock people, do some devops & code review), but eventually I had to jump into the backend, because, as the most senior developer, I'm expected to jump into whatever part is having trouble. The backend had to receive events from a webhook and accumulate statistics on those events, then serve these statistics via REST API Frontend was plain old React reaching the REST API. Issues: * The database (MS SQL Server, as recommended by Microsoft) would randomly lock up for days. Bear in mind this was a 1GB of RAM (the minimum amount that Microsoft accepts as enough to run a SQL Server instance) RDS serving around 600 MB of data. * The introduction of the Repository Pattern (as recommended by the ASP.net documentation) introduced a lot of complexity (including incompleted/non-defined operations) that slowed down significantly the development. * LINQ supports interleaving DB operations with not-db operations, quickly becoming a O(n^m) footguns. If you make `row => row.x > 5` a method, LINQ will happily download all the rows and run the comparison in program instead of in the DB. Bear in mind I can't construct these footguns with django ORM, or make them typecheck with any Haskell data access framework. * The test runner UI would pretend no tests existed if the code didn't compile for any reason. Trying to debug something by running a specific failing test? If you miss a semicolon now you have to go find your test again. * The logger would log the message and the affected class in different lines. Do you want to grep for an error? You better know the obscure grep syntax for "previous line". Want to change the logging format? Good luck finding the code that adds the newline in order to find how to influence it. If you ask the IDE to find the implementation of the logging function it will show you the interface, nothing more. * You better not do some type of async stuff in LINQ, because the system is going to spawn a process for each entry, obliterating your production instance by creating thousands of processes, using a bunch of MB for each process. There were more issues, I didn't make an exhaustive list of them because, you know, I don't need to make exhaustive lists of malfunctions and bad design ideas for other programming languages.
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  Based on this anecdote, it sounds like the team had little or no .net experience and your seniors probably don't deserve the title.
  - javcasas 5y ago
    Curiously, I haven't had these problems in Python/cherrypy/django/flask, Haskell/snap/yesod, NodeJS/express/nextjs, so, maybe it's something beyond lack of .net experience.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      Your experience mirrors mine, both early (circa 2005) and more recently. Footguns are common. I am not sure where the .NET community coalesces (python and similar tend to hit up IRC).
      - topkai22 5y ago
        The ability to find and get answers on stack overflow is pretty impressive, although that might not be the “community” your looking for. I’ve had decent direct engagements with them framework dev tends on GitHub before as well.
        tomrod 5y ago
        To add on to community -- it's more than that as well, it's the zeitgeist. In the scientific computing world, if something has hit NumFocus' portfolio then it's active, maintained, accessible, and (IMO) can consider adding into a tech stack. Similar for Apache for general FLOSS projects. I don't understand the dotnet's extension ecosystem -- how to find quality sourcing, etc. Going from an established project into dotnet SDK makes sense. But searching GitHub for useful dotnet frameworks -- stars are probably misleading here?
    - koide 5y ago
      There's been lots of bad decisions along the way for .net, but In its current state (.net Core 6) I can't really see any of your problems happening. Although what strikes me most is your first point. Running SQL server on 1gb and complaining that it didn't work well isn't really wise. Maybe this happened on the early years of .net Core or even on FF?

javcasas 5y ago

I initially directed (as organise stories, unblock people, do some devops & code review), but eventually I had to jump into the backend, because, as the most senior developer, I'm expected to jump into whatever part is having trouble. The backend had to receive events from a webhook and accumulate statistics on those events, then serve these statistics via REST API Frontend was plain old React reaching the REST API. Issues: * The database (MS SQL Server, as recommended by Microsoft) would randomly lock up for days. Bear in mind this was a 1GB of RAM (the minimum amount that Microsoft accepts as enough to run a SQL Server instance) RDS serving around 600 MB of data. * The introduction of the Repository Pattern (as recommended by the ASP.net documentation) introduced a lot of complexity (including incompleted/non-defined operations) that slowed down significantly the development. * LINQ supports interleaving DB operations with not-db operations, quickly becoming a O(n^m) footguns. If you make `row => row.x > 5` a method, LINQ will happily download all the rows and run the comparison in program instead of in the DB. Bear in mind I can't construct these footguns with django ORM, or make them typecheck with any Haskell data access framework. * The test runner UI would pretend no tests existed if the code didn't compile for any reason. Trying to debug something by running a specific failing test? If you miss a semicolon now you have to go find your test again. * The logger would log the message and the affected class in different lines. Do you want to grep for an error? You better know the obscure grep syntax for "previous line". Want to change the logging format? Good luck finding the code that adds the newline in order to find how to influence it. If you ask the IDE to find the implementation of the logging function it will show you the interface, nothing more. * You better not do some type of async stuff in LINQ, because the system is going to spawn a process for each entry, obliterating your production instance by creating thousands of processes, using a bunch of MB for each process. There were more issues, I didn't make an exhaustive list of them because, you know, I don't need to make exhaustive lists of malfunctions and bad design ideas for other programming languages.

hallway_monitor 5y ago
Based on this anecdote, it sounds like the team had little or no .net experience and your seniors probably don't deserve the title.
- javcasas 5y ago
  Curiously, I haven't had these problems in Python/cherrypy/django/flask, Haskell/snap/yesod, NodeJS/express/nextjs, so, maybe it's something beyond lack of .net experience.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Your experience mirrors mine, both early (circa 2005) and more recently. Footguns are common. I am not sure where the .NET community coalesces (python and similar tend to hit up IRC).
    - topkai22 5y ago
      The ability to find and get answers on stack overflow is pretty impressive, although that might not be the “community” your looking for. I’ve had decent direct engagements with them framework dev tends on GitHub before as well.
      - tomrod 5y ago
        To add on to community -- it's more than that as well, it's the zeitgeist. In the scientific computing world, if something has hit NumFocus' portfolio then it's active, maintained, accessible, and (IMO) can consider adding into a tech stack. Similar for Apache for general FLOSS projects. I don't understand the dotnet's extension ecosystem -- how to find quality sourcing, etc. Going from an established project into dotnet SDK makes sense. But searching GitHub for useful dotnet frameworks -- stars are probably misleading here?
  - koide 5y ago
    There's been lots of bad decisions along the way for .net, but In its current state (.net Core 6) I can't really see any of your problems happening. Although what strikes me most is your first point. Running SQL server on 1gb and complaining that it didn't work well isn't really wise. Maybe this happened on the early years of .net Core or even on FF?