4 ms·

> let myself atrophy, run on a treadmill forever, for something You're lucky to afford the luxury not to atrophy. It's been almost 4 years since my last softw

by raducu 8mo ago

> let myself atrophy, run on a treadmill forever, for something You're lucky to afford the luxury not to atrophy. It's been almost 4 years since my last software job interview and I know the drills about preparing for one. Long before LLMs my skills naturally atrophy in my day job. I remember the good old days of J2ME of writing everything from scratch. Or writing some graph editor for universiry, or some speculative, huffman coding algorithm. That kept me sharp. But today I feel like I'm living in that netflix series about people being in Hell and the Devil tricking them they're in Heaven and tormenting them: how on planet Earth do I keep sharp with java, streams, virtual threads, rxjava, tuning the jvm, react, kafka, kafka streams, aws, k8s, helm, jenkins pipelines, CI-CD, ECR, istio issues, in-house service discovery, hierarchical multi-regions, metrics and monitoring, autoscaling, spot instances and multi-arch images, multi-az, reliable and scalable yet as cheap as possible, yet as cloud native as possible, hazelcast and distributed systems, low level postgresql performance tuning, apache iceberg, trino, various in-house frameworks and idioms over all of this? Oh, and let's not forget the business domain, coding standards, code reviews, mentorships and organazing technical events. Also, it's 2026 so nobody hires QA or scrum masters anymore so take on those hats as well. So LLMs it is, the new reality.

aftergibson 8mo ago
This is a very good point. Years ago working in a LAMP stack, the term LAMP could fully describe your software engineering, database setup and infrastructure. I shudder to think of the acronyms for today's tech stacks.
- oldandboring 8mo ago
  And yet many the same people who lament the tooling bloat of today will, in a heartbeat, make lame jokes about PHP. Most of them aren't even old enough to have ever done anything serious with it, or seen it in action beyond Wordpress or some spaghetti-code one-pager they had to refactor at their first job. Then they show up on HN with a vibe-coded side project or blog post about how they achieved a 15x performance boost by inventing server-side rendering.
  - aftergibson 8mo ago
    Highly relevant username!
    - oldandboring 8mo ago
      I try :)
carimura 8mo ago
Ya I agree it's totally crazy.... but, do most app deployments need even half that stuff? I feel like most apps at most companies can just build an app and deploy it using some modern paas-like thing.
- KronisLV 8mo ago
  > I feel like most apps at most companies can just build an app and deploy it using some modern paas-like thing. Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy. But obviously that’s not Serious Business™ and won’t give you zero downtime and high availability. Though tbh most mid-size companies would also be okay with Docker Swarm or Nomad and the same software clustered and running behind HAProxy. But that wouldn’t pad your CV so yeah.
  - ryandrake 8mo ago
    > Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy. That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC. How did we get to the point where applications by default came with all of this shit?
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      When I was in primary school, the librarian used a computer this way, and it worked fine. However, she had to back it up daily or weekly onto a stack of floppy disks, and if she wanted to serve the students from the other computer on the other side of the room, she had to restore the backup on there, and remember which computer had the latest data, and only use that one. When doing a stock–take (scanning every book on the shelves to identify lost books), she had to bring that specific computer around the room in a cart. Such inconveniences are not insurmountable, but they're nice to get rid of. You don't need to back up a cloud service and it's available everywhere, even on smaller devices like your phone. There's an intermediate level of convenience. The school did have an IT staff (of one person) and a server and a network. It would be possible to run the library database locally in the school but remotely from the library terminals. It would then require the knowledge of the IT person to administer, but for the librarian it would be just as convenient as a cloud solution.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
dullcrisp 8mo ago
That was on NBC.

by raducu 8mo ago

aftergibson 8mo ago

This is a very good point. Years ago working in a LAMP stack, the term LAMP could fully describe your software engineering, database setup and infrastructure. I shudder to think of the acronyms for today's tech stacks.

oldandboring 8mo ago
And yet many the same people who lament the tooling bloat of today will, in a heartbeat, make lame jokes about PHP. Most of them aren't even old enough to have ever done anything serious with it, or seen it in action beyond Wordpress or some spaghetti-code one-pager they had to refactor at their first job. Then they show up on HN with a vibe-coded side project or blog post about how they achieved a 15x performance boost by inventing server-side rendering.
- aftergibson 8mo ago
  Highly relevant username!
  - oldandboring 8mo ago
    I try :)

carimura 8mo ago

Ya I agree it's totally crazy.... but, do most app deployments need even half that stuff? I feel like most apps at most companies can just build an app and deploy it using some modern paas-like thing.

KronisLV 8mo ago
> I feel like most apps at most companies can just build an app and deploy it using some modern paas-like thing. Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy. But obviously that’s not Serious Business™ and won’t give you zero downtime and high availability. Though tbh most mid-size companies would also be okay with Docker Swarm or Nomad and the same software clustered and running behind HAProxy. But that wouldn’t pad your CV so yeah.
- ryandrake 8mo ago
  > Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy. That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC. How did we get to the point where applications by default came with all of this shit?
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    When I was in primary school, the librarian used a computer this way, and it worked fine. However, she had to back it up daily or weekly onto a stack of floppy disks, and if she wanted to serve the students from the other computer on the other side of the room, she had to restore the backup on there, and remember which computer had the latest data, and only use that one. When doing a stock–take (scanning every book on the shelves to identify lost books), she had to bring that specific computer around the room in a cart. Such inconveniences are not insurmountable, but they're nice to get rid of. You don't need to back up a cloud service and it's available everywhere, even on smaller devices like your phone. There's an intermediate level of convenience. The school did have an IT staff (of one person) and a server and a network. It would be possible to run the library database locally in the school but remotely from the library terminals. It would then require the knowledge of the IT person to administer, but for the librarian it would be just as convenient as a cloud solution.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

dullcrisp 8mo ago

That was on NBC.