4 ms·

no offense, but man, the amount of tooling you guys are using sounds to me insane. How is a person able to oversee and understand everything. The older i get th

no offense, but man, the amount of tooling you guys are using sounds to me insane. How is a person able to oversee and understand everything. The older i get the more i feel distantiated and disconnected to these modern practices. I am afraid that if I ever have to find a new workspace i wont be able to succeed because of this.

zmmmmm 4y ago
I definitely relate to this but frequently challenge myself and then overcome it. You just have to bite the bullet and carve out some time to try them out. The key thing to understand is that all these things are shrouded in incomprehensible jargon and alien sounding names that make it incredibly intimidating to get started. But the fact is, it is a wide but shallow pool of jargon sitting on top of the same old computing fundamentals that have been around since the 1970s. You will find if you know your fundamentals, then the jargon is far less difficult to overcome than it seems. You just need a bit of exposure and if you spend any amount of time playing with the tech it just starts to happen by osmosis. (If there are fundamentals you aren't solid on, treat it as an opportunity to bed that in - even these things are not generally super complex in the end).
vbezhenar 4y ago
I'm so-called full stack developer so I have to be on top of it and it's hard. I'm constantly behind so I spend quite a lot of time catching up whenever I'm getting chance. It's possible (e.g. I think that I can one-handed build an application with react frontend and java/golang/node backend, build a k8s cluster and deploy everything, following best practices), but it's lot of things that you'll forget eventually. I think that one sane way is specialization. Become an expert in writing nginx-ingress yamls in some big corporation. Another sane way is to throw away modern tech and stay with old tech. You can deploy perl cgi to OpenBSD just like you could 20 years away. Another way is to carefully select technologies which were proven for 7+ years. I'm trying to follow this way.
vasco 4y ago
No offense but that list of tools is miniscule and you should pause if you think it's anywhere near "insane". For comparison a regular handyman with a basic set of tools easily has 50+ if they just started. It's definitely possible to understand all of that and way more. Unless you're fresh out of uni and never worked on a professional company with more than a couple of people you'd see many more.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- coryrc 4y ago
  I'm not GP, but I used to write firmware. I had a C compiler, a debugger, and emacs. IIUC, if you write a web application in the MS world, you have Visual Studio, ASP.Net, and IIS. There doesn't have to be piles of libraries.
davepeck 4y ago
No offense taken. As a fellow old person (whose first computer as a young kid was a TI-99/4A) I definitely feel this pain. But because I am also an old engineer who works with a lot of other old engineers we are lucky to have a shocking number of human-years’ accumulated experience not only selecting a pile of tools and frameworks but also sticking with them from zero to $BIGCO. Put another way, I’ve shot myself in the foot more times than I can count with these tools and I do it less often and in more esoteric ways these days. I can’t claim the same degree of experience with all these tools, of course. Pyright is bleeding edge. Tailwind is still the new kid. Relative to (say) Python and Django or Flask, React is new too. Most of the pain and learnings come from these newer moving parts. Is it “better”? That depends on the axes of evaluation. As a startup studio where the 70% case might be “SaaS that takes a back-office process held together today by Excel & email and makes it way better” the answer is: sometimes, unequivocally yes. Not just because of the tools and the potential velocity they can confer, but because of the kinds of teams we can build around them. Sometimes, plain old Django with nothing added is a clearly better choice. In the end, every startup is its own snowflake. We try to select “starter stacks” that balance industry familiarity with our ability to offer meaningful operational perspective. We definitely don’t think of them as the final world.
agumonkey 4y ago
I think it was a subtle trend of making everything in tiny blocks while javascript / html5 evolving a lot, it created a jungle. But deno/bun/esbuild minded tools are more integrated, faster and leaner it seems (hot reload, typechecking, high perf all in one)

zmmmmm 4y ago

I definitely relate to this but frequently challenge myself and then overcome it. You just have to bite the bullet and carve out some time to try them out. The key thing to understand is that all these things are shrouded in incomprehensible jargon and alien sounding names that make it incredibly intimidating to get started. But the fact is, it is a wide but shallow pool of jargon sitting on top of the same old computing fundamentals that have been around since the 1970s. You will find if you know your fundamentals, then the jargon is far less difficult to overcome than it seems. You just need a bit of exposure and if you spend any amount of time playing with the tech it just starts to happen by osmosis. (If there are fundamentals you aren't solid on, treat it as an opportunity to bed that in - even these things are not generally super complex in the end).

vbezhenar 4y ago

I'm so-called full stack developer so I have to be on top of it and it's hard. I'm constantly behind so I spend quite a lot of time catching up whenever I'm getting chance. It's possible (e.g. I think that I can one-handed build an application with react frontend and java/golang/node backend, build a k8s cluster and deploy everything, following best practices), but it's lot of things that you'll forget eventually. I think that one sane way is specialization. Become an expert in writing nginx-ingress yamls in some big corporation. Another sane way is to throw away modern tech and stay with old tech. You can deploy perl cgi to OpenBSD just like you could 20 years away. Another way is to carefully select technologies which were proven for 7+ years. I'm trying to follow this way.

vasco 4y ago

No offense but that list of tools is miniscule and you should pause if you think it's anywhere near "insane". For comparison a regular handyman with a basic set of tools easily has 50+ if they just started. It's definitely possible to understand all of that and way more. Unless you're fresh out of uni and never worked on a professional company with more than a couple of people you'd see many more.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
coryrc 4y ago
I'm not GP, but I used to write firmware. I had a C compiler, a debugger, and emacs. IIUC, if you write a web application in the MS world, you have Visual Studio, ASP.Net, and IIS. There doesn't have to be piles of libraries.

davepeck 4y ago

No offense taken. As a fellow old person (whose first computer as a young kid was a TI-99/4A) I definitely feel this pain. But because I am also an old engineer who works with a lot of other old engineers we are lucky to have a shocking number of human-years’ accumulated experience not only selecting a pile of tools and frameworks but also sticking with them from zero to $BIGCO. Put another way, I’ve shot myself in the foot more times than I can count with these tools and I do it less often and in more esoteric ways these days. I can’t claim the same degree of experience with all these tools, of course. Pyright is bleeding edge. Tailwind is still the new kid. Relative to (say) Python and Django or Flask, React is new too. Most of the pain and learnings come from these newer moving parts. Is it “better”? That depends on the axes of evaluation. As a startup studio where the 70% case might be “SaaS that takes a back-office process held together today by Excel & email and makes it way better” the answer is: sometimes, unequivocally yes. Not just because of the tools and the potential velocity they can confer, but because of the kinds of teams we can build around them. Sometimes, plain old Django with nothing added is a clearly better choice. In the end, every startup is its own snowflake. We try to select “starter stacks” that balance industry familiarity with our ability to offer meaningful operational perspective. We definitely don’t think of them as the final world.

agumonkey 4y ago

I think it was a subtle trend of making everything in tiny blocks while javascript / html5 evolving a lot, it created a jungle. But deno/bun/esbuild minded tools are more integrated, faster and leaner it seems (hot reload, typechecking, high perf all in one)