6 ms·

This reminds me strongly of reaching the final year industry projects in my software engineering degree, and seeing a significant portion of my colleagues unabl

This reminds me strongly of reaching the final year industry projects in my software engineering degree, and seeing a significant portion of my colleagues unable to develop software in any meaningful way. There was a curriculum correction in the years afterwards I think, but so many students had zero concept of version control, of how to start working on a piece of software (sans an assignment specification or scaffold), or how to learn and apply libraries or frameworks in general. It was unreal.

intelVISA 2y ago
Is that unique to software though? Plenty of people can follow a plan but still find it tough to start from first principles, I would think.
- SkiFire13 2y ago
  I've worked for a bit in an engineering company and I was surprised at how bad they were at versioning their documents.
  - codazoda 2y ago
    Do you have any examples of correctly versioned documents?
    - josephg 2y ago
      I mean, I’d say a markdown / latex / typst document in a Git repository would fit the bill. I’m working on a history project at the moment which has reconstructed the version history of the US constitution based on the secretarial records and various commentaries written during the drafting process. At the moment we’re working on some US state constitutions, the Indian constitution, Irish peace process and the Australian constitutional process. We only have so many historical records of the committee processes, but it turns out to be more than enough to reconstruct the version history of the text.
      - andai 2y ago
        Fascinating, what tools are you using to keep track of all that? (Also, are there any interesting practices involved here?)
        josephg 2y ago
        All custom tooling. I should write it up at some point - there's an awful lot to say about the whole thing, both technically and historically. And the data shows that there are several things apparently taught in American schools (like the idea that the final text is a compromise between the Virginia plan and New Jersey plan) that are simply wrong.
    - SkiFire13 2y ago
      Some big issues were: - they were manually tracking the "versions" of documents by copy-pasting them in some folders - and even this was only done for each "release" of each document; inbetween two releases all the changes were made to files shared on Onedrive (possibly concurrently by two people, sometimes leading to conflicts with the loss of days of work) - at every release the changes since the last release had to be looked up manually every time and included in a document; this was very time consuming. - informations were duplicated in multiple documents, with no way to relate them; every change to one of them had to be manually replicated to the others. I would argue that a correctly versioned document should not have these issue. A dedicated software should track all the changes, including individual ones inbetween releases. It should also provide a way to list them, possibly relative to some milestore (like the last release). Data should be kept in a format that's easy to automatically compare for changes, and hopefully in a deduplicated way so that changes need to be made only in one place. If that's not possible I would argue there should be a software that checks for inconsistent informations and prompts for them to be synchronized. In the software development world this has mostly been solved by version control systems like git and continuous integration to ensure that the codebase is in a consistent state after every change.
bdndndndbve 2y ago
At the end of my 5 year computer engineering degree, one of the groups had nothing to show for their industry project. They had written an Android app with MySQL credentials hard-coded into it, and on the school's network they couldn't connect to port 3306. They could have changed the MySQL port, or they could have written a REST API, but instead they just gave up and it didn't matter. I was already pretty disillusioned with my undergrad program but that was really the icing on the cake.
ninkendo 2y ago
In my senior design project in college, we were the only team that decided to use version control. I pushed for it, and set up a CVS server, mostly because I was the team lead and thought it was an easy way to feel like I was making a difference on the team. This was around 2005 or so, git didn’t really exist yet, svn was the new kid on the block and cvs was the established player. I had never used any vcs before and neither had anyone on any team, but man was it worth it. The ability to have one place with the latest code and not emailing zip files around was great, but so was being able to easily roll back to a known good version if we caused an issue, compare changes, etc. By the end of it we all agreed it would have been impossible to do as well as we did if we didn’t do version control. (This was a cross disciplinary engineering curriculum with ME/CE/CS, ours was slightly more software-heavy than other teams but everyone had some amount of software. Version control wasn’t taught and most teams just didn’t even consider it. It was a very different time from today.)
- compootr 2y ago
  That seems pretty crazy to me (18M) even for one-off scripts, I'll often throw them into a VCS because why not!
  - wduquette 2y ago
    When I started programming professionally in the 1980's there were really only two choices, RCS and SCCS, neither of which were networked, and which were really only readily available on Unix. I suppose there were commercial products for DOS (this was pre-Windows), but again, not readily available. If you wanted better, you had to roll your own. Later, for SunOS, we had big, expensive systems like ClearCASE and Harvest that were (as I recall) weird as all get out, over-engineered, expensive (did I mention expensive?) and all too often designed for the convenience of the management, not the programmers. Then there was CVS, which was a revelation. You didn't have to have a server, if you wanted to use it locally, all by yourself; I did that on my personal laptop. Otherwise you needed to set up a server. Subversion was an improvement. And then came Git (and Fossil, et al) and the world changed forever.
  - ninkendo 2y ago
neerajsi 2y ago
I was an EE undergrad. The formative project for me was a competition to see who could make the fastest digitally controlled maze solving robot. The key that gave my team an advantage was the humble ASSERT. If the robot got off track, it would stop in place, blink a light, and show a line number on a digital display. I've been working in and around Windows for a long time, and I'd say asserts and crash dumps are the two things that allow us to improve our quality given that we're still mostly using C/C++.
MrMcCall 2y ago
Our final CS course, Operating Systems, was in C, after all the previous courses were in Pascal. Luckily, I had already gotten access to various Unix systems and had taught myself C (thanks, K&R !!). And I say luckily because it was expecially lucky for my SWE group members who would otherwise have not graduated. I was already 10x at that point because of early access and passion for the craft. Most if not all of them had already decided that programming was not their career path, so it was in everyone's benefit and happiness. Funny enough, there was no version control at our uni (a pretty good one, but not primarily technical), and that OS we tweaked for the course was the current version of Tanenbaum's Minix that Linus transformed into Linux. 20 minutes for a recompile and test loop to fix that stupid mistake in the semaphore logic was painful, but that's life on a 286. It took real passion to want to bang through that learning curve. It really weeded out the folks who were just looking for an engineering job, at least for the handful (4) of people I knew in the program.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > It really weeded out the folks who were just looking for an engineering job Wanting an engineering job means that engineering is such an important part of your life that you desire that your job (i.e. many hours each day) centers around it. The breed of people that you mentioned to be weeded out were not looking for an engineering job, but for some well-paid (often management) job that formally requires engineering qualifications, but where the daily business has barely to do anything related to engineering.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    In this ~40yo case, I'm guessing it was more of a "I got into a very prestigious state university because I busted my butt in high school and I've learned that CS is a high growth industry." The talented and hard working folks got in and found that studying algorithms at the beginning of the 3rd year from a textbook was doable, but designing and implementing a significant software system (or tweaking an operating system) in the 4th year is a whole other level. It's just that software design and engineering is really a unique beast. I mean, it is the most difficult engineering on the planet, because every single other industry and discipline depends upon it.

intelVISA 2y ago

Is that unique to software though? Plenty of people can follow a plan but still find it tough to start from first principles, I would think.

SkiFire13 2y ago
I've worked for a bit in an engineering company and I was surprised at how bad they were at versioning their documents.
- codazoda 2y ago
  Do you have any examples of correctly versioned documents?
  - josephg 2y ago
    I mean, I’d say a markdown / latex / typst document in a Git repository would fit the bill. I’m working on a history project at the moment which has reconstructed the version history of the US constitution based on the secretarial records and various commentaries written during the drafting process. At the moment we’re working on some US state constitutions, the Indian constitution, Irish peace process and the Australian constitutional process. We only have so many historical records of the committee processes, but it turns out to be more than enough to reconstruct the version history of the text.
    - andai 2y ago
      Fascinating, what tools are you using to keep track of all that? (Also, are there any interesting practices involved here?)
      - josephg 2y ago
        All custom tooling. I should write it up at some point - there's an awful lot to say about the whole thing, both technically and historically. And the data shows that there are several things apparently taught in American schools (like the idea that the final text is a compromise between the Virginia plan and New Jersey plan) that are simply wrong.
  - SkiFire13 2y ago
    Some big issues were: - they were manually tracking the "versions" of documents by copy-pasting them in some folders - and even this was only done for each "release" of each document; inbetween two releases all the changes were made to files shared on Onedrive (possibly concurrently by two people, sometimes leading to conflicts with the loss of days of work) - at every release the changes since the last release had to be looked up manually every time and included in a document; this was very time consuming. - informations were duplicated in multiple documents, with no way to relate them; every change to one of them had to be manually replicated to the others. I would argue that a correctly versioned document should not have these issue. A dedicated software should track all the changes, including individual ones inbetween releases. It should also provide a way to list them, possibly relative to some milestore (like the last release). Data should be kept in a format that's easy to automatically compare for changes, and hopefully in a deduplicated way so that changes need to be made only in one place. If that's not possible I would argue there should be a software that checks for inconsistent informations and prompts for them to be synchronized. In the software development world this has mostly been solved by version control systems like git and continuous integration to ensure that the codebase is in a consistent state after every change.

bdndndndbve 2y ago

At the end of my 5 year computer engineering degree, one of the groups had nothing to show for their industry project. They had written an Android app with MySQL credentials hard-coded into it, and on the school's network they couldn't connect to port 3306. They could have changed the MySQL port, or they could have written a REST API, but instead they just gave up and it didn't matter. I was already pretty disillusioned with my undergrad program but that was really the icing on the cake.

ninkendo 2y ago

In my senior design project in college, we were the only team that decided to use version control. I pushed for it, and set up a CVS server, mostly because I was the team lead and thought it was an easy way to feel like I was making a difference on the team. This was around 2005 or so, git didn’t really exist yet, svn was the new kid on the block and cvs was the established player. I had never used any vcs before and neither had anyone on any team, but man was it worth it. The ability to have one place with the latest code and not emailing zip files around was great, but so was being able to easily roll back to a known good version if we caused an issue, compare changes, etc. By the end of it we all agreed it would have been impossible to do as well as we did if we didn’t do version control. (This was a cross disciplinary engineering curriculum with ME/CE/CS, ours was slightly more software-heavy than other teams but everyone had some amount of software. Version control wasn’t taught and most teams just didn’t even consider it. It was a very different time from today.)

compootr 2y ago
That seems pretty crazy to me (18M) even for one-off scripts, I'll often throw them into a VCS because why not!
- wduquette 2y ago
  When I started programming professionally in the 1980's there were really only two choices, RCS and SCCS, neither of which were networked, and which were really only readily available on Unix. I suppose there were commercial products for DOS (this was pre-Windows), but again, not readily available. If you wanted better, you had to roll your own. Later, for SunOS, we had big, expensive systems like ClearCASE and Harvest that were (as I recall) weird as all get out, over-engineered, expensive (did I mention expensive?) and all too often designed for the convenience of the management, not the programmers. Then there was CVS, which was a revelation. You didn't have to have a server, if you wanted to use it locally, all by yourself; I did that on my personal laptop. Otherwise you needed to set up a server. Subversion was an improvement. And then came Git (and Fossil, et al) and the world changed forever.
- ninkendo 2y ago

neerajsi 2y ago

I was an EE undergrad. The formative project for me was a competition to see who could make the fastest digitally controlled maze solving robot. The key that gave my team an advantage was the humble ASSERT. If the robot got off track, it would stop in place, blink a light, and show a line number on a digital display. I've been working in and around Windows for a long time, and I'd say asserts and crash dumps are the two things that allow us to improve our quality given that we're still mostly using C/C++.

MrMcCall 2y ago

Our final CS course, Operating Systems, was in C, after all the previous courses were in Pascal. Luckily, I had already gotten access to various Unix systems and had taught myself C (thanks, K&R !!). And I say luckily because it was expecially lucky for my SWE group members who would otherwise have not graduated. I was already 10x at that point because of early access and passion for the craft. Most if not all of them had already decided that programming was not their career path, so it was in everyone's benefit and happiness. Funny enough, there was no version control at our uni (a pretty good one, but not primarily technical), and that OS we tweaked for the course was the current version of Tanenbaum's Minix that Linus transformed into Linux. 20 minutes for a recompile and test loop to fix that stupid mistake in the semaphore logic was painful, but that's life on a 286. It took real passion to want to bang through that learning curve. It really weeded out the folks who were just looking for an engineering job, at least for the handful (4) of people I knew in the program.

aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> It really weeded out the folks who were just looking for an engineering job Wanting an engineering job means that engineering is such an important part of your life that you desire that your job (i.e. many hours each day) centers around it. The breed of people that you mentioned to be weeded out were not looking for an engineering job, but for some well-paid (often management) job that formally requires engineering qualifications, but where the daily business has barely to do anything related to engineering.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  In this ~40yo case, I'm guessing it was more of a "I got into a very prestigious state university because I busted my butt in high school and I've learned that CS is a high growth industry." The talented and hard working folks got in and found that studying algorithms at the beginning of the 3rd year from a textbook was doable, but designing and implementing a significant software system (or tweaking an operating system) in the 4th year is a whole other level. It's just that software design and engineering is really a unique beast. I mean, it is the most difficult engineering on the planet, because every single other industry and discipline depends upon it.