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Keypressing is a hurdle for me. I know that comes with experience. Very little if any software is truly novel and it all looks and feels very similar. Everythin
by SanderNL 4y ago
Keypressing is a hurdle for me. I know that comes with experience. Very little if any software is truly novel and it all looks and feels very similar. Everything I see is patterns and boilerplate. I do not see the insurmountable complexity anymore.
Scientists are the ones coming up with novelty. We hook up databases to UIs and manage infrastructure. Sure there is complexity but it is of a very superficial kind. Like a ball of Christmas lights.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIf there is a universal pattern that lets you effortlessly design large non-trivial software systems across all domains, please do publish it. It will do more for productivity than Copilot or ChatGPT ever will.
- SanderNL 4y agoWell, if you ask how to design “large” systems then the answer is already “don’t”. And besides that’s not a technical issue, our issues are organizational and political. Also, yes there is an universal pattern and that is called a competent and experienced software engineer. We lack those. We have a lot of kids with fancy degrees.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThere's large systems that do useful things though that don't decompose into smaller systems. Shouldn't we have those? Compilers. VMs. Operating systems. Search engines. LLMs...?
- SanderNL 4y agoThe core tech of LLMs is famously simple. All the rest decomposes just fine. I know we suck at it and there often nontechnical forces that steer us into other directions, but I don’t see big fundamental issues AI can’t already help with. I know that there is complexity, but the essential part of it is not our job. That is my point. We are accidental complexity managers. I know we like to think working on compilers and browsers is magic, but compared to other fields it’s nothing special. And by the way, you and I know that exactly 6.78% of devs are employed in those domains and of those 1.12% work on core parts. I am sorry if I come off annoying and stupid because I am both. You of course raise an interesting point it’s just that I don’t feel like going into wide(r) tangents.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoWhy are you working on the boring parts, just gluing together prefab components?
- SanderNL 4y agoSee my last paragraph. Also it’s all glueing prefab parts. Software dev is a dead end job anyway, all parts of it.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoHuh. I don't glue prefab parts when I develop.
- SanderNL 4y agoYou do OS development?
- marginalia_nu 4y agoNo, but I've built an internet search engine.
- SanderNL 4y agoOh right, nice one btw, but seriously how are you not glueing prefabs? Are you writing your own db engine? Network layer?
- marginalia_nu 4y agoYes on the db engine, at least for the document indexing part. I'm not building absolutely everything from scratch, a significant part of it is bespoke. There's just not a lot of off-the-shelf stuff that's built to deal with this type of application. You do occasionally see attempts at building internet search engines out of like elasticsearch or stuff like that, but it just doesn't scale.