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Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)
- ferguess_k 6mo agoThis genuinely looks like that I wrote it...until I saw that LISP line, definitely not me. But do agree with a lot of items in the list, and I happen to be a DE, too.
- dognotdog 6mo agoI am a big fan of learning LISP, at least once. Going through SICP after more than a decade of writing code for a living was probably the single best thing I did to deepen my understanding of a lot of compsci concepts, data structures, and how to think about software. For me, at least, it was very much a seeing the matrix for the first time kind of moment. My LISP use has quickly declined, but I've dabbled in dozens of programming languages since then, and I do attribute not feeling lost to that experience.
- ferguess_k 6mo agoOh I do agree with that. It's just my interest is on another field so I can be confident to say that I didn't write it.
- sitzkrieg 6mo ago“a new job in two weeks.” heh, yeah everyone was opining expertise back then when employees had control of the market.
- GenericDev 6mo ago[dead]
- cdman 6mo agoWhat are you quoting, because I can't find that text in the article!?
- xxs 6mo agoIt was about getting fired (your manager stuff) and then moving to another job very shortly afterwards (the two weeks is correct)
- georgemcbay 6mo agoThe two weeks reference was in the reddit post the blog post linked to. https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nmodyl/drunk_post_things_ive_learned_as_a_sr_engineer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nmodyl/dru... > He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks. And... yeah... the reddit post is from 5 years ago when the job market was very, very different.
- antonvs 6mo agoFTA: > What’s the [worst] that can happen? He fire me? I’ll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.
- SCUSKU 6mo agoAged like milk for sure.
- YZF 6mo agoLost me at dynamic languages. Don't build anything of any significance in dynamic languages! ;) Some good points. Laughed at TDD is a cult. I mean a lot of software orgs/cultures are cultish (Agile, Scrum, whatnot). At work I often feel I'm part of a cult.
- atomicnumber3 6mo agoOn the contrary, I find "The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me." is exactly my sentiment too, with a caveat. I really like gradual typing, like python has. And not like ruby has (where it's either RBS files and it's tucked away, or it's sorbet and it's weird).
- whateveracct 6mo agoYou can just as easily take a static language dynamic - in userland. I've interop'd with JS from Haskell and you can just go full dynamic property access. And gradually add phantom typed APIs around it.
- paulryanrogers 6mo agoDebugging Haskell and JS in the same stack? You kids are brave. And/or I'm a coward and a simpleton.
- whateveracct 6mo agoI debug in ghci mostly console.log also still works fine
- YZF 6mo agoThe worst code base I had to work in by far was a Python code base. Extremely difficult to refactor. Many bugs that were completely avoidable with static typing. I think maybe more modern Python is a little bit better but wouldn't be my choice for large projects. It's not just about correctness. It's also about performance. That code was so slow and that impacted our business.
- MathMonkeyMan 6mo ago> Algorithms and data strictures are important — to a point. I don’t see pharmacist interviews test trivia about organic chemistry. There’s something fucked with our industry’s interview process. Pharmacists have to get a special degree before they can even get an interview, and I've heard that the education is heavy on organic chemistry. Then you get a job as a cashier selling pills. > Hacker news and r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless. You got me. > Once, someone asked me who I looked up to and I said Conan O’Brien [...] He wrote for SNL and studied literature at Harvard, so there's probably plenty going on up there.
- thakoppno 6mo ago> on his last show on the Tonight Show, he told his audience to be kind and work hard Conan really handled that disaster with tremendous grace and it paid immediate dividends. I can’t really think of a similar situation in popular culture. It is a good reminder of how to handle oneself especially during turmoil.
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago> Max out our 401ks If there's any 20-somethings here that make 6 figures, listen carefully: 1. Max out your 401k, and invest all of it in a target date retirement fund. (Some companies are douches and will assign you mostly their own stock, which when it tanks, there goes your retirement... so check your allocation) 2. Get an HSA and max that out. Invest it all in a target date retirement fund. Do not use any of it, pay for medical expenses with cash and save your receipts. Get reimbursed for the receipts when you retire. 3. Contribute to an IRA and max it out (or backdoor roth when you make enough that that's necessary). Invest it all in a target date retirement fund. 4. Keep 6-12 months of living expenses in a high yield savings account. If you start when you're 23, and you make $100k/yr, you can retire at 45. That may sound very old right now, and you might think, I'll just save later. But consider that when you turn 45, you may realize you have 20 more years of this shit job before you can retire.
- tempaccount5050 6mo agoIt's incredible how out of touch this place is sometimes.
- paulryanrogers 6mo agoEven with this strategy, you're not retiring at 45 unless you are frugal, have cheap hobbies, and never have kids or a non-working spouse. Also take care that you don't have any parents, siblings, or extended family that come to rely on you. Also don't forget expect to live anywhere even remotely expensive, unless you like camping.
- kmoser 6mo agoNot sure why this was downvoted; it doesn't say you shouldn't do all those things, only that they're no guarantee you'll be able to retire at 45.
- lynx97 6mo ago> non-working spouse Does that mystical creature still exist? Or is it perhaps more likely if one of the pair has a high yield income?
- throwanem 6mo ago"HR" does not set your professional obligations. If you need to be drunk to talk this honestly, you are not a "senior" nor a mentor, but an incipient alcoholic and a coward. Then again, this person is obviously also lying to claim the engineer title - sit down, "data science!" You're only even here because Product prefers being lied to - so that really sets an ironically honest baseline on how seriously anyone should be taking any of this farrago.
- freakynit 6mo ago"If you’re not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It’s a shitty programming language that’s good at almost everything." - I agree, 100%. And here's a take that a lot of the folks will disagree, and categorically state that these both belong to two entirely different domains: "Rust, is the evolution of Java. Not Kotlin, not Scala, not clojure, but, Rust".
- jauntywundrkind 6mo agoThe context dependency injection is so so so good. Once we switched over to json & Jax-rs, it made such a great simple direct backend. Good throughput. Just, a bit high memory.
- corvus-cornix 6mo agoI feel like Go has a similar role to Java. Although it's mercifully free of inheritance and the functional stuff they've bolted on. Rust has a similar role to C++ but reads more like Python and Elixir's lovechild.
- nasretdinov 6mo agoYeah Go is a new Java essentially. Also arguably it's a much better alternative because of static linking and no JIT
- Neikius 6mo agoOh I don't know. It's a vision of java if java tried to supplant C and not C++. I guess jit is bad for a micro service that scales constantly or a lambda. But java does have all of these options now. They just are not useful for most people.
- Zak 6mo agoI hadn't thought about Rust that way before, but I think you might be on to something here. Rust and Java both lean heavily into keeping developers from doing anything dangerous with expressiveness and power being pretty far down the list of concerns.
- jdw64 6mo ago[dead]
- dang 6mo agoRelated: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27333260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27333260 - May 2021 (494 comments)
- joshka 6mo ago> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there’s any recommendations, I’d seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.) Good docs are docs that make it easy to implement the next feature. From an AI perspective, it's my observation that LLMs often write code with lower quantity / quality docs. At the same time, they are reasonably good at synthesizing / inferring meaning from code that lacks good docs. They often do so internally by forming a chain of thought / reasoning around how the code works. The docs that should be written as part of the code are probably the same things that an LLM would reasonably come to by spending tokens when modifying that code. I believe that this should be trained into model so that future LLM work starts with not having to build up context. In the absence of that being built in, something I've been experimenting a little with is tuning what I want to see in docs that actually help source control / development. Currently that's at https://github.com/joshka/skills/tree/main/doc-steward https://github.com/joshka/skills/tree/main/doc-steward - still needs a bunch of work, but it's generally better than nothing. YMMV
- joshka 6mo ago> Don’t meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He’s a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he’s making it up as he goes along like the rest of us. Ha yup - I've felt this one before :D
- chrneu 6mo agoeveryone is guessing some are just a bit better at guessing
- atoav 6mo agoI am not sure which profession they are in (software development?), but no. Not everybody is guessing. If they were you would have half of the buildings and bridges collapsing and the other half on fire by bad electrical wiring. You can legitly learn how to do things properly and people who learnt to do that do the polar opposite of guessing. It is just that the world of software development has yet to be made liable for their results in the same way as civil or electrical engineers. So in software development many are just guessing because guessing wrong won't ruin their life.
- JohnMakin 6mo agoSoftware "engineering" also differs in the way from more formal engineering in that there are very rarely absolutes, there's often many different correct ways to solve a problem, each possessing their own pros and cons. So, it could feel like "guessing" choosing a certain approach over another, but more senior people usually have an intuition brought from experience which one will work better and be more informed of the tradeoffs, so it looks a lot less like guessing.
- rowanG077 6mo agoI mean that is the case as well for other engineering principles. There is not just one way to design a working and steady bridge.
- 6mo ago
- xxs 6mo agoQuite a few major issues with the post: - Drinking wine solo is odd. Whiskey, vodka, or beer (and if you Russian) is the standard. Spelling mistakes like 'ever thing' support the idea of alcohol induced unordered thoughts, that's good. - Webdevs would one of the last to consider to be experts. - While I don't use darkmode, browser extensions solve the unsupported web pages. Dark mode used to be the only possible option on a black/green screen, glad that changed. - Pharmacist require a degree and quite a few years of studies and exams with tons of organic chemistry. - HN comments being worthless is an awkward one. Lots of posts (e.g. Apple CEO change) had tons of useless stuff but it's very often the comments would bve better than the post itself.
- rimliu 6mo agoyour comment on drinks is odd.
- hyperadvanced 6mo agotheir comments on HN comments is funny as well in light of the original claim
- ramon156 6mo agoTongue-in-cheek
- colejhudson 6mo agoPOV you don't live anywhere near Sonoma.
- sp4cec0wb0y 6mo agoLOL. I worked for a big wine company out in Sonoma (doing software). A lot of people I knew solo-drink wine.
- Barbing 6mo ago>Lots of posts (e.g. Apple CEO change) had tons of useless stuff Funny to read from someone else who noticed :) maybe broad appeal of the topic had a big impact
- estetlinus 6mo ago> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there’s any recommendations, I’d seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.) Just wait till he hears about Claude Code
- dwedge 6mo agoI feel strange about someone deciding an interesting use of their time is getting drunk alone to write a blog post.
- nothrabannosir 6mo agoWait until you hear about Bukowski, Faulkner or Kerouac.
- dwedge 6mo agoSure, there are alcoholics in the past. But sitting with the intention of sounding drunk, interspersing deliberate typos with "pour another drink" and "take a sip" because someone thought that was a cool premise is weird. It's one thing to write drunk, it's another thing to get drunk to write about being drunk
- virgildotcodes 6mo ago> It's one thing to write drunk, it's another thing to get drunk to write about being drunk I would again see Bukowski.
- dwedge 6mo agoIs Bukowski generally seen as a role model?
- snayan 6mo agoI don't think the dude drunken rambling on reddit was aspiring to be a role model, just share what he perceived as wisdom he's gained in life.
- dwedge 6mo agoHe wasn't drunken rambling though, he was getting drunk to do it. I think there's a real difference in message there - as much as it was probably fake.
- rconti 6mo agoWow, this is 2021? Feels like 2014. SQL, getting a new job in 2 weeks, etc.
- Xenoamorphous 6mo agoHas SQL somehow become less relevant?
- rjbwork 6mo agoI would argue quite the contrary. NoSQL DBs got through their hype cycle and are now a standard part of stacks, but SQL (especially via Postgres) has re-emerged as the golden standard for the bulk of data needs.
- theshrike79 6mo agoEspecially when companies over-provision their databases. Partially because the jump from cheap-ass to mid-tier is a massive increase in capacity. Then you can offload stuff to the DB engine (as it should be), making everything more efficient, less data going between DB and App layers is good for everyone. Also you get to do cool SQL shit nobody understands and you become invaluable =)
- sjamaan 6mo ago> Also you get to do cool SQL shit nobody understands and you become invaluable =) Goddamn right!
- sgarland 6mo agoUnless your role is DB-specific, at which point people stare at you blankly as you’re raging about B+trees and sort buffers, and then ignore you when you tell them for the Nth time that they should refactor their schema.
- rconti 6mo agoI guess maybe I'm thinking of how the traditional DBA role seems to have significantly declined (at least, from where I sit). Maybe because that work is being pushed to the devs :)
- pcblues 6mo agoI did TDD properly the first time in my Masters Degree (ongoing). It was an eye-opener. Write your program in two different ways to make sure you know the requirements by making their outputs match. That's not me being snarky. It actually works well. Just make sure you can type quickly.
- landgenoot 6mo agoUntil you have a real life scenario and are dependent on 3 external services that spit out enormous JSON's. It's nice for writing libraries though
- anal_reactor 6mo agoMy biggest lessons I've learned as non-senior non-engineer: 1. You'll never be as smart as the smart guys. It's okay to give up. 2. Most likely you'll work with incompetent fools, get used to that. 3. Workplace is the best place to make friends. If someone tells you otherwise it's a psyop to turn you into a robot. 4. Minimize your output while trying to maximize your salary because mythical "job satisfaction" doesn't exist and it makes much more sense to redirect your energy elsewhere. 5. Luck is the most important factor. There is nothing I've done at work I'm truly proud of. Everything I'm proud of is completely unrelated to work.
- znpy 6mo ago> A lot of progressive companies, especially startups, talk about bringing your “authentic self”. Well what if your authentic self is all about watching porn? Yeah, it’s healthy to keep a barrier between your work and personal life. this is probably the best truth. after a while it's easy to recognize people that are consistently being their "authentic self" and they're usually the worst. FFS, be professional at work.
- sergiopreira 6mo ago[dead]
- junon 6mo ago> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Document why. I can read code. I want to know _why_ this nebulous function called "invert_parameters" that is 200 lines long even exists. Which problem did you have that this function solved? Why was this problem there in the first place? Write some opinions on maybe its intended lifetime of the codebase. Hell, I write comments that apologize, just so that a future reader knows that the code I wrote wasn't meant to be great but that I was in a time crunch or a manager was breathing down my neck, or that some insane downstream/upstream thing did something... well, insane. Paint some picture of your mindset when writing something, especially if it's non-obvious, as that'll give all the additional context not captured in code, when reading the code. Obviously this isn't the only good documentation rule, but I wish people - juniors and seniors alike - would do this more often, especially at the workplace.
- markus_zhang 6mo agoSadly I have rarely seen people doing this. These shadow knowledge usually went away with their owners when they left the company, left other people scratching their heads.
- palmotea 6mo ago> Sadly I have rarely seen people doing this. These shadow knowledge usually went away with their owners when they left the company, left other people scratching their heads. Some of that's inevitable, but I'm continuously surprised about how unconcerned people are about it day to day. I document why stuff in comments, commit messages, and other documents all the time. It's super easy since 1) I've been there when that shadow knowledge goes away, 2) I can think about future-me when I write that stuff, because I know I'll forget a lot of it. I don't know why so many people have a problem with doing the same, and need to be constantly reminded to do it. Probably a big part is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I don't consider anything to be definitive, it's all clues to be pieced together later, and I just like to leave as many clues as possible.
- markus_zhang 6mo ago
- yomismoaqui 6mo ago> Hacker news and r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless.
- cynicalsecurity 6mo ago> What’s the worse that can happen? He fire me? I’ll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks. That did not age well.
- oompydoompy74 6mo ago“Hacker news and r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless.” In full effect as per usual.
- alexpotato 6mo agoDan Luu has an amazing collection of great comments from HN that are worth the read: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ https://danluu.com/hn-comments/
- y0eswddl 6mo agoReading all the Sam Altman glazing from 10 years ago, knowing what i know now...
- okokwhatever 6mo agoMe? not much. Ive learned more in the streets...
- athrow 6mo ago> You know what the best part of being a software engineer is? You can meet and talk to people who think like you. Not necessarily the same interests like sports and TV shows and stuff. But they think about problems the same way you think of them. That’s pretty cool. That hasn't really been my experience, for every 50 people I meet maybe 1 is here for the craft, the rest want to do 9-5, have a visibility at work, work on impactful projects but actually talk about their problems, their opinions in a deeper way - almost never.
- grvdrm 6mo agoI’m with you. I find 1 or 2 people in each place, but that’s it. Quite deep connections are rare
- rubslopes 6mo agoI had more luck finding "similar minds" in academia.
- ggerules 6mo agoI'll second that.
- ljm 6mo agoI'm not really sure how that's exclusive to software engineers either. But OP was drunk at the time of writing so I guess they were feeling a bit lovey-dovey.
- kirubakaran 6mo agoMy trick is to go to Emacs meetups. Nobody is using Emacs for money.
- burningChrome 6mo agoI did find this, but also the fact there is a huge sharing community. When I was in marketing, most of the people would show up, do their work and go home. Lunch was spent complaining about this new report or some new algo the sales team wanted us to be using. On the flip side when I became a developer, it really felt more like being a part of a real community. People would show up at my desk and say, "Dude, have you seen this new plugin?" or "Man, I just found the coolest logic game, you'd love it!" or "I just started playing around with this new JS framework, have you tried it yet?" As in, all the people I met were so genuinely interested in my opinion. Lunches were suddenly brainstorming sessions. Or someone had a problem and we'd all sit around frantically scribbling on napkins trying to solve it. Or talk about the latest conference or when DefCon was and who was going. You really felt a part of a culture in every way. The devs I got to be friends with genuinely loved what they did. It wasn't just a job, it really was something they were all passionate about. Something that consistently extended beyond the 9-5 jobs we had. Side projects were always a hot topic at gatherings and lunches. For the first time in my career, I really was proud to be apart of the developer community at a time when everything was (and still is) changing so rapidly. Without those friends and mentors, I have no idea where I would be. It was kind of like landing at college and finally finding a place you felt you finally belonged and fit in with like minded folks.
- homeonthemtn 6mo ago"Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks." Literally the only thing I miss
- AnimalMuppet 6mo agoDo you know that you can just buy a whiteboard? Or was the point a shared whiteboard? If your Teams-or-equivalent doesn't have it, there's still an app for that.
- StableAlkyne 6mo agoI read it as collab. I hate in-office work, but I'll admit it is just easier to walk over to a whiteboard with a coworker to hash things out. Sure there's software for "whiteboarding" but it's just not the same. And until everyone has drawing tablets it won't be as freeform
- bikelang 6mo agoTotally agree - it’s not at all the same. White boarding and the camaraderie you build in person are the things I miss. Thankfully my team still gets together for a week once a quarter. I think that’s an pretty ok balance.
- homeonthemtn 6mo agoShared white board. It was nice being in a room with a bunch of other salty people brainstorming an idea and doodling on a board
- broken-kebab 6mo agoFor a drunk post it's damn long!
- markus_zhang 6mo agoPeople tend to be talkative when they are drunk!
- resonious 6mo ago> The best way I’ve advanced my career is by changing companies. This is interesting. At my employer we see job hopping as a bad thing. I think there's a unique perspective you get by seeing your 5+ year old code in production. I can kinda tell when someone only does short stints based on the way they talk about other people's code.
- orsorna 6mo agoThey probably also take home more income since they are getting raises more often which allows them to purchase free time to further hone their skills, rather than collecting a fixed wage and minimal equity from a corporation and the satisfaction of their work being minimally rewarded for five years.
- AnimalMuppet 6mo agoMaybe it should be almost a Fibonacci thing: Change after one year is fine, the first time. Maybe the second. After that, the length of the jobs had better start going up, or it's an alarm bell (unless they're contracts).
- markus_zhang 6mo agoI usually keep it between 2-3 years. Is that a red flag?
- resonious 6mo agoNot quite red but cutting it close!
- markus_zhang 6mo agoThanks! Guess I’m in the perpetual movement to my dream fields.
- ljm 6mo agoIf you can't hold something down for more than a year then it looks rough to anybody. 18-24 months generally seems to have been the sweet spot in terms of improving your income. Especially because the promise of equity after 4 years often means fuck all and you almost never see a promotion or a decent pay increase either for inflation or performance. If an employer is going to ding you for taking advantage of the market then they better be offering enough above market to keep you around for longer.
- giannicmptr1000 6mo agoCheers! From an ex bartender and current red team. This rounds on the house.
- stego-tech 6mo ago> I don’t know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there’s another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little. Mood. Like yeah, everyone at the moment is criminally underpaid with relation to productivity gains and cost of living, but generalists in general are woefully underpaid compared to narrow specialists. I come from the IT space, where I've got to fight tooth and nail to keep my job versus the race-to-the-bottom mentality of MSPs and outsourced sweatshops overseas. I'm a generalist who builds globe-spanning networks while memorizing VLAN schemas across dozens of sites, while also owning IAM across Entra and Okta for the Enterprise and the associated JAMF/InTune MDM profiles for mobile and desktop endpoints, and the SME for Windows server environments and VMware VCF datacenters and the AWS/GCP/Azure tenant, all while forecasting and budgeting for future CapEx and OpEx projects within the IT space for long-term planning relative to corporate needs and strategy. I own storage, identity, server, endpoint, networks, physical security, infrastructure, cyber security, hardware, software, licensing, architecture, support, and on-call, in orgs ranging from 20 to 80k people in size. I've saved companies 20x the TC they paid me through cost-effective infrastructure. You know what employers feel that skill set is worth right now, with 15 years experience? $130k, exactly what I made in 2019 before COL doubled. Not even enough to make median rent in my metro (~$3500) on a standard 50/30/20 post-tax budget scheme. It's disgusting out there. Nobody wants to pay the people who do the actual work.
- cube00 6mo ago> Hacker news and r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless. I've been rate limited by the HN mods and knowing I can only reply a few times a day now I don't bother reading the comments anymore because I can't participate. It also feels icky to continue when you're no longer welcome somewhere, but they're trying to be nice by slowing you down rather then an outright ban. I was worried that means I'll miss out but maybe that "pull" I feel to check the comments might not be such a bad habit to break as I might not have been getting the value I thought from it (at least I hope so)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Cerium 6mo agoSome perspective: I feel that I participate here, yet most days I don't write even a single comment. When I comment I rarely write more than two comments a day.
- benhurmarcel 6mo agoI don't know, I never got an invitation to Lobsters and yet I still go through it regularly. You find some interesting links and comments even if you can't participate.
- aquariusDue 6mo agoSame, sometimes the same thing gets posted on both places and it's interesting to compare the discussions. Other times some really cool niche things gets posted there but not here or doesn't gain enough traction to be visible (to me) here and I end up reading about it on there. What's also nice is that because the community is smaller there you end up seeing familiar faces and due to that on some threads I actually hope they post their take/opinion. That's my parasocial third place these days /s
- sp4cec0wb0y 6mo agoI can shoot you an invite. Email me.
- joelandtiger 6mo agoCan we get more elaboration on "Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer"?
- JohnMakin 6mo ago> There’s not enough women in technology. What a fucked up industry. That needs to change. I’ve been trying to be more encouraging and helpful to the women engineers in our org, but I don’t know what else to do. Same with black engineers. What the hell? See what the current thought leaders in tech believe and say out loud and this makes a lot more sense.
- tpsvca 6mo agoThe most useful thing I learned: constraints you don't choose are better product decisions than constraints you invent. I'm running a link shortener on shared hosting. No SSH, FTP-only deploys, no background workers, no Redis. Every time I wanted to add something "proper" — a job queue, a WebSocket, a cache layer — the hosting said no. So I didn't. The result: click notifications go out via a cron job that hits a PHP endpoint once an hour. No queue, no retry logic, no worker process. It either sends or it doesn't, and I log the outcome. Six months in, it works fine. If I'd had a VPS from day one I'd have built something I'd still be maintaining. The shared hosting said "you get a cron and a database" and that turned out to be enough.
- rafterydj 6mo ago> Hacker news and r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless. LOL can't disagree with that opinion.
- ryanthedev 6mo ago> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.