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> The installer, written in Python, often failed because of incorrect assumptions about the target environment and almost always required some manual interventi

> The installer, written in Python, often failed because of incorrect assumptions about the target environment and almost always required some manual intervention to complete successfully. Nothing ever changes. I spent half a day just getting some SDR development stuff to work just now, long live Python code with baked in hard dependencies on particular versions of obscure libraries... In the end it worked, but what a mess.

alexjplant 9mo ago
I've worked at a place or three where development environment setup took the better part of two days. Sometimes it was due to shitty proprietary software that nobody had bothered to automate the installation and configuration of. Other times it was due to an accumulation of crufty half-abandoned OSS projects with shell script glue liberally applied to hold it all together. In virtually all cases these environments would break randomly every few months and lead to unnecessary dev downtime. One place I worked decided that it'd be easier to build an AMI and provision quasi-ephemeral EC2 instances to developers instead of putting the time in to pare down the landfill of dev dependencies they had. This whole process was, of course, orchestrated by a custom CLI that would itself randomly break in odd ways. Fun times.
- reactordev 9mo ago
  I got let go once because they didn’t have setup instructions and hardcoded their own paths into scripts and things that “worked on their machine”. The reason they gave was “Unable to perform basic environment setup”. Some people are just born stupid.
  - collingreen 9mo ago
    Roughly this happened to me once. Got a horrible review after doing what I felt was a heros effort. I'll skip the details but the cherry on top was "you did all this work but it didnt build on the cloud server so we're not going to count it for anything" - the "cloud server" (of the live project) was the ctos laptop and it could only build his local stuff (you could even see the local paths in the web output). As if that wasn't enough, literally all he had to do was git pull and it would have all the new work on it. Cto was eventually fired for trying to steal the company IP and he went on to fail upward making a security camera company infra famously insecure and got a ton of very valuable stock for it. Life is weird!
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      You worked with the founder of Flock?
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    Well, I probably was born stupid then. This was a Gnuradio setup (super impressive piece of software by the way) for a not-very-well supported SDR running an even less well supported GRC file. I'd been putting it off because I know those tell tale little clouds on the horizon well enough by now. Anyway, it's working now. But what a nightmare.
    - reactordev 9mo ago
      On the contrary, you're intelligent because you had to deal with and fix, stupid.
- normie3000 9mo ago
  > I've worked at a place or three where development environment setup took the better part of two days. I feel like this is a real barrier to getting effective contributions from outside of existing team members. Some colleagues seem to see this as an advantage.
Nextgrid 9mo ago
Python is an absolute disaster when it comes to packaging runnable artifacts. I love the language for server-side stuff where I control the environment (the final deliverable is a container image) but there’s no way I’d use it for anything else.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  JS isn't much better. It's as if toy languages are suddenly used to make the backbone of our lives.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    How did that happen? How did toy languages start getting used for serious work? I can understand JS to an extent because of first class functions, but Lua is like a better, properly designed JS and also has them.
    - paganel 9mo ago
      > How did toy languages start getting used for serious work? Because those "toy" languages delivered the goods, while the "serious" ones fumbled their way big time. It was very funny seeing how lambda-the-ultimate.org forum was a Drupal installation (meaning both PHP and said Drupal).
      - pdimitar 9mo ago
        So they just got there first? Not an impressive feat then. We all had to make do with shoddy stuff just to get a project done (and I am not talking only in programming but also in meat-space). But to then hold on to it with a death grip, yeah, these people I don't respect.
        paganel 9mo ago
        Nobody is stoping anyone on putting a quick project up-and-running using Rust, let's say. But good luck finding people to maintain it in the long run. And good luck finding the "batteries included" stuff. And good luck on many other things. We're all building bazaars, not cathedrals, and that's ok, even though we oftentimes seem to forget that.

alexjplant 9mo ago

I've worked at a place or three where development environment setup took the better part of two days. Sometimes it was due to shitty proprietary software that nobody had bothered to automate the installation and configuration of. Other times it was due to an accumulation of crufty half-abandoned OSS projects with shell script glue liberally applied to hold it all together. In virtually all cases these environments would break randomly every few months and lead to unnecessary dev downtime. One place I worked decided that it'd be easier to build an AMI and provision quasi-ephemeral EC2 instances to developers instead of putting the time in to pare down the landfill of dev dependencies they had. This whole process was, of course, orchestrated by a custom CLI that would itself randomly break in odd ways. Fun times.

reactordev 9mo ago
I got let go once because they didn’t have setup instructions and hardcoded their own paths into scripts and things that “worked on their machine”. The reason they gave was “Unable to perform basic environment setup”. Some people are just born stupid.
- collingreen 9mo ago
  Roughly this happened to me once. Got a horrible review after doing what I felt was a heros effort. I'll skip the details but the cherry on top was "you did all this work but it didnt build on the cloud server so we're not going to count it for anything" - the "cloud server" (of the live project) was the ctos laptop and it could only build his local stuff (you could even see the local paths in the web output). As if that wasn't enough, literally all he had to do was git pull and it would have all the new work on it. Cto was eventually fired for trying to steal the company IP and he went on to fail upward making a security camera company infra famously insecure and got a ton of very valuable stock for it. Life is weird!
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    You worked with the founder of Flock?
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  Well, I probably was born stupid then. This was a Gnuradio setup (super impressive piece of software by the way) for a not-very-well supported SDR running an even less well supported GRC file. I'd been putting it off because I know those tell tale little clouds on the horizon well enough by now. Anyway, it's working now. But what a nightmare.
  - reactordev 9mo ago
    On the contrary, you're intelligent because you had to deal with and fix, stupid.
normie3000 9mo ago
> I've worked at a place or three where development environment setup took the better part of two days. I feel like this is a real barrier to getting effective contributions from outside of existing team members. Some colleagues seem to see this as an advantage.

Nextgrid 9mo ago

Python is an absolute disaster when it comes to packaging runnable artifacts. I love the language for server-side stuff where I control the environment (the final deliverable is a container image) but there’s no way I’d use it for anything else.

jacquesm 9mo ago
JS isn't much better. It's as if toy languages are suddenly used to make the backbone of our lives.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  How did that happen? How did toy languages start getting used for serious work? I can understand JS to an extent because of first class functions, but Lua is like a better, properly designed JS and also has them.
  - paganel 9mo ago
    > How did toy languages start getting used for serious work? Because those "toy" languages delivered the goods, while the "serious" ones fumbled their way big time. It was very funny seeing how lambda-the-ultimate.org forum was a Drupal installation (meaning both PHP and said Drupal).
    - pdimitar 9mo ago
      So they just got there first? Not an impressive feat then. We all had to make do with shoddy stuff just to get a project done (and I am not talking only in programming but also in meat-space). But to then hold on to it with a death grip, yeah, these people I don't respect.
      - paganel 9mo ago
        Nobody is stoping anyone on putting a quick project up-and-running using Rust, let's say. But good luck finding people to maintain it in the long run. And good luck finding the "batteries included" stuff. And good luck on many other things. We're all building bazaars, not cathedrals, and that's ok, even though we oftentimes seem to forget that.