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> My classic C programmer curmudgeon take is that the root of the problem, as with everything else in this industry, is bad software built on top of bad softwar

> My classic C programmer curmudgeon take is that the root of the problem, as with everything else in this industry, is bad software built on top of bad software built on top of bad software... and on it goes. No, not really. Nowadays things are way way better than how they were a decade ago. Nowadays you can get pipelines that build and test on multiple target platforms with a dozen or so lines of code, and things run so well that they became reliable infrastructure integrated with your prod system. Back then you had none of this, and had to pay the salary for a "build engineer" who worked like a wizard stirring a cauldron just to get a single production build out of the door.

blueflow 4y ago
The bad things are still around in your infra even if you manage to never see them because you only see the "dozens lines of code" at the front.
- mrjin 4y ago
  Someone who really buys that "dozens lines of code" will definitely has no idea what kind of complexity it was about.
hinkley 4y ago
I’ve been cultivating this opinion that it’s the other way around. In any other domain, few people use crap tools to make something amazing, and I think it comes down to what you surround yourself with informs what you make. We need better tools if we want better things.
mrjin 4y ago
Oh sure. Can you try to set up ANY CI pipelines to make it more or less working, don't worry about "pipelines that build and test on multiple target platforms" and get back to share with us your experiences?
- allarm 4y ago
  What exactly do you want to hear? Not op, but I’ve been doing it for some time.
  - mrjin 4y ago
    How much code did you write to get it barely working all by yourself? Or you were just working on top of someone else's work? I did it a couple of times, it was never something like "dozens lines of code".
rthille 4y ago
Back in the late 90's I worked on a system that shipped on 4 different chip architectures, 4 different (unix-based) operating systems, dealt with different endianness and was more reliable and easier to understand. And it was more responsive to users with 1990's hardware than stuff is today. :shrug:

blueflow 4y ago

The bad things are still around in your infra even if you manage to never see them because you only see the "dozens lines of code" at the front.

mrjin 4y ago
Someone who really buys that "dozens lines of code" will definitely has no idea what kind of complexity it was about.

hinkley 4y ago

I’ve been cultivating this opinion that it’s the other way around. In any other domain, few people use crap tools to make something amazing, and I think it comes down to what you surround yourself with informs what you make. We need better tools if we want better things.

mrjin 4y ago

Oh sure. Can you try to set up ANY CI pipelines to make it more or less working, don't worry about "pipelines that build and test on multiple target platforms" and get back to share with us your experiences?

allarm 4y ago
What exactly do you want to hear? Not op, but I’ve been doing it for some time.
- mrjin 4y ago
  How much code did you write to get it barely working all by yourself? Or you were just working on top of someone else's work? I did it a couple of times, it was never something like "dozens lines of code".

rthille 4y ago

Back in the late 90's I worked on a system that shipped on 4 different chip architectures, 4 different (unix-based) operating systems, dealt with different endianness and was more reliable and easier to understand. And it was more responsive to users with 1990's hardware than stuff is today. :shrug: