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Reading these posts always make me feel like an imposter. People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs.
by adelmotsjr 6mo ago
Reading these posts always make me feel like an imposter. People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs.
- brailsafe 6mo agoStart working through the layers! It's incredibly rewarding to go from just typical day job stuff to understanding bits and pieces of esoteric low level implementation. One level at a time, it's not that bad, although it is hard and takes effort. I know next to nothing either, but having felt the same way a few years ago, these kind of posts now at least excite me instead of just intimidate.
- eurg 6mo agoAll good. I tell people how to add another mailbox to their Outlook, "click here, now there". Not glorious. Necessary anyways.
- huflungdung 6mo ago[dead]
- DeathArrow 6mo ago>People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs. CRUDs do pay the bills.
- zerr 6mo agoThe grass is always greener on the other side - many low-level programmers feel like an imposter when it comes to high-level systems such as CRUD apps.
- irishcoffee 6mo agoThey don't. The "simplicity" of using a "high-level" framework for someone who bit-shifts for a living is almost comical.
- chistev 6mo agoReally?
- bombcar 6mo agoI know literal kernel developers who can handle drivers and race conditions any day of the week who can't wrap their mind around Outlook, let alone GUI updates.
- anthk 6mo agoMyself. Forth it's easy, 9front C it's manageable but POSIX it's hell and managing both Unix descendants are a piece of cake. GUI interfaces for the enterprise came from Dante's hell themselves. I hate them, they are like the Madhouse from that Asterix movie making satire of the European bureucracy of the day. The often are oddly designed and they are not documented at all, you must guess the meaning by chance of with a senior tutoring you. The same with anything corporate from Microsoft with AD roles/group policies and the like. Or anything coming from IBM.
- timacles 6mo agolol you guys are being too nice. Building CRUD apps is just implementing business logic by gluing APIs together, there is nothing to understand except the business domain, which is only done through exposure, because business logic is random. And then the APIs which are all essentially a kludge because of the shifting business logic. Understanding low level code puts you on entirely different level because you can reason about a problem using logic and how systems operate. No disrespect to any crud devs here but from my personal experience they just know a particular implementation of their domain and rarely even consider how the code base even operates as a whole
- bombcar 6mo agoKernel developers know that, eventually, they'll figure out how the system works and is supposed to work. CRUD developers know that they never, ever will, because business logic is insane.
- -drews 6mo agoI felt this way moving from embedded into backend for the first time and having no idea where to start. Was incredibly daunting, but both domains become trivial over time.
- Rick76 6mo agoCan confirm, my buddy who is someone I respect immensely, is an embedded programmer. He will talk about OS events, or any low level concept and it makes me feel like I don’t know anything, but he acts like I’m a genius if I talk about JavaScript Runtimes, browser engines, anything frontend. It’s cool he teaches me new things, I teach him some
- __natty__ 6mo agoSome people are exceptional at solving difficult but hard to explain problems while other are great solving direct business problems. No need to feel ashamed for both it’s just different work
- throwawaytea 6mo agoI think your friend is just being kind. Most people know that there is a big difference between experience in something pretty easy vs mastery of something very difficult. A rocket scientist acknowledges a concrete guy knows way more than he does about concrete, but also knows that doesn't make him a genius because it's easy enough to learn just being around it. Plus, the rocket scientist also knows that since he knows so little about concrete, he wouldn't even be able to judge if the guy is really a concrete genius or just saying things a real pro would label wrong. Your example isn't that crazy, but still, you should realize your friend is just being nice.
- surajrmal 6mo agoI work on OS/embedded and my wife in server backend. I definitely feel like a simpleton when trying to understand all of the high level stuff she works on. It doesn't invalidate my own expertise. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging someone has skills that you don't have and likely would take a long time to pick up.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Pannoniae 6mo agoYeah exactly. High-level people think the low-level stuff is magic, and us from the other side think the high-level stuff is magic (how can you handle all that complexity?...)
- guzfip 6mo ago> how can you handle all that complexity?... You don’t. Someone else smarter than you handled it already and you just need to integrate their solution.
- zerr 6mo ago"Someone else smarter than you manufactured microchips and you just need to integrate their solutions."
- zerr 6mo agoYup. AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean and SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory agree as well :)
- dgunay 6mo agoYou can probably learn to do these things too with enough determination, but don't sell yourself short. Some CRUD apps can get deceptively complicated. Businesses have a way of coming up with just the right requirements to completely invalidate your architecture if you don't know what you're doing.
- dmitrygr 6mo agoPlay with low level things. It'll help you in your daily job in ways you do not yet imagine. Start here: nandgame.com
- Teknoman117 6mo agoAs someone who works on systems at this level, believe me, it’s a learnable skill. And at least an intellectually valuable one I think too. Even if you never really need the knowledge for the things you do, there’s a nice feeling that comes from seeing something done at a high level and understanding how that makes its way down into the system and why those design choices were made. If I were more money motivated I’d probably be building CRUD apps too. I just like weird puzzles XD.
- zem 6mo agoI work on compilers, and have bounced several times off trying to write my own full stack crud app for a personal project (tried doing it in rails, phoenix and django at various times). I'm finally getting somewhere with claude's help, but it really is its own set of skills - easy to get started with but hard to do well.
- amoss 6mo agoYou may be surprised by how much easier it is to dump the framework/stack and just write it from scratch. I say this because I too work on compilers and have a crud app as a personal project. The first versions were a nightmare in various frameworks and since I switched to a C++ backend / vanilla .js frontend it has been incredibly easy to write.
- zem 6mo agointeresting, how did you manage the db interactions in c++? and did you have a single executable for the app and the web server combined?
- amoss 6mo agono database for this project - the data model has a simple text representation so it gets serialized out to a folder/file layout on disk that goes into version control. single self-contained binary: contains the web/websockets server, backend logic, parser/serialization. there is a separate component in python that sits behind an internal network connection to handle an execution sandbox.
- johnnyanmac 6mo agoMeanwhile, I can't really do either because the job market sucks and I don't have time to contribute the way I want to to project like this.
- pier25 6mo agoSame. I feel like a plumber compared to real engineers.
- dole 6mo agoYou’re still an engineer. Knowing the right places to click in an esoteric app is like knowing where to hit the boiler with a hammer to get it working again.
- kalinkochnev 6mo agoEngineers feel like plumbers compared to the plumbers
- IIsi50MHz 6mo agoEngineers & architects leave a lot of detail out of their designs, relying on the plumbers and other trades to figure out the Right Thing. (-:
- wishfish 6mo agoNot only do the CRUDs have value but they're good for your sanity. I knew a guy back in the dot-com era. Very skilled coder. Backbone of the company. He pulled off miracles. Fulfilled impossible deadlines. Then one day, out of the blue, he quit. Took a job at a non-technical corp. They put him in a cubicle where he wrote Visual Basic CRUDs on an 8-5 schedule. No weird deadlines, no sleeping under the desk. He called it his paid vacation.
- genodethrowaway 6mo agoai slop
- rationalist 6mo agoLooking at the user's other comments, I disagree. Looking at your comments however, while probably not AI, they're still not helpful.
- crustaceansoup 6mo agoNever seen an LLM write so many short, halting sentences in a row. Very human.
- wishfish 6mo agoYou can tell from my comment that I'm not AI. I've had a lifelong habit of using commas instead of dashes in situations where the dashes would have been more appropriate. AI would always go for the dash. First time I've been accused of AI.
- komali2 6mo ago> He called it his paid vacation. As a fellow CRUD writer you're kinda seconding the OP's point here... Personally I say oh well, some people are smarter and/or harder working than me. Now watch this drive -
- wishfish 6mo agoI was seconding his point. I personally ended up in educational software which is CRUD-adjacent in terms of stress and sanity. Never regretted it.
- crtified 6mo agoDon't feel too bad - I had to Google what CRUD means. :D
- torginus 6mo agoWhy do people belittle CRUDs? Or even call them that? I have written quite a few applications, where there was a frotend which displayed things stored in a SQL db, with certain operations allowing you to modify said db, which I guess would fall into the CRUD variety, but the least of the complexity, and usefullness lay in that fact.
- Deebster 6mo agoCRUD = Create, Read, Update, Delete Plenty of business apps don't really ask for much more than that, and those are the CRUD apps. They're not particularly challenging to write, nor is it very interesting to do so.
- enbugger 6mo ago[dead]
- JollySharp0 6mo agoI am a normal web dev / CRUD app coder. All of this isn't beyond your ability. Every so often I hit a problem that requires me to go all the way down to the OS level and find out what is going wrong or into the core framework and you find out that most of the code is actually less complex, better documented and clearer than a lot of the garbage bespoke applications you have to deal with at the higher levels.
- Tade0 6mo agoIf it's any consolation I can out-imposter you: lately I've been mostly reviewing LLM-generated code.