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Did you miss the sarcasm even in retrospect? Because I don't really see how it can be possible to read this article and not understand that I'm pointing out tha

Did you miss the sarcasm even in retrospect? Because I don't really see how it can be possible to read this article and not understand that I'm pointing out that all of these things we did are terrible ideas and you shouldn't do them.

aangjie 14y ago
I can't speak for the parent, but i really didn't retrospect at all, infact read the article and just came over here to read the comments. Am not sure what it shows (that my reading habits have become perfunctory or the writing doesn't lend easily to visualization) and so i will shut up. :P -- as someone else hinted at.
Patient0 14y ago
Yes the overall tone of the article was clear that it was "this is what you shouldn't do" - but I read it as implying that somehow this rube-goldberg-esque contraption was arrived at by a series of logical and reasonable steps, one of which would have been "re-write the REST layer because HTTP is slow". So it was kinda implying that this was actually a reasonable step to take in isolation... My problem with the statement "HTTP is slow": All of the reasons why an HTTP connection might be giving poor performance (serialization costs, SSL encryption costs, TCP latency) are not intrinsic to HTTP and would be a problem for any protocol that goes over the network. So it's almost never accurate to say "HTTP is slow". Anyway thanks for sharing the write up. It's easy to sneer and say "what a bunch of clueless idiots!" but when I think back on some of the stuff I did when I was first starting out as a programmer and thought I was shit-hot: * My first ever experiment with Yacc ended up in a "scheduler" with a custom dependency language for expressing the dependencies, used to schedule our whole overnight batch processing * After learning about smart pointers in C++, I knew that they were the way to go! I happily wrote: std::vector<std::auto_ptr<T>> - it was only a year after I had resigned that my (ex) boss, who was still on friendly terms, calls me up to query why the latest version of the C++ compiler won't compile this code.... "Did I write this? What the fuck was I thinking!?" * I think my first Java class was a very complicated thing that, at the end of the day, allowed one to "more easily" write code to read a CSV file... Well, it's all a learning experience! </shudder>
- DRMacIver 14y ago
  I'm not sure I would call the steps "reasonable" per se. They're much more obviously bad ideas in retrospect than they were at the time, but a lot of them should have been pretty obviously bad ideas at the time as well. On the HTTP is slow thing: I think I was pretty clear in the write up that we had failed to performance test and it wasn't at all clear that our replacement was faster. I think these are sufficient disclaimers that I was pretty obviously labelling it "HEY DON'T DO IT THIS WAY" :-)
  - triplesec 14y ago
    this is where code gets to be a bit like dating and general human interaction. "it seemed like a good idea at the time".
triplesec 14y ago
Up to a point, McGyver. I'm a Brit and I missed the "it's obviously terrible", but I could here the ironic amusement at your own former selves and prepared for the worst. I'm admittedly not the world's greatest developer, and this makes me realise why many may miss your subtlety in this case: it's blindingly obvious only to those who are knowledgeable enough, or where an author cannily signals to lesser mortals that there is trouble ahead. I suspect you just signalled marginally too little for the mean audience. This is a board read by lots of sorts of geeks, and a rhetorical limitation may be that your optimal audience may be full-stack devs.

aangjie 14y ago

I can't speak for the parent, but i really didn't retrospect at all, infact read the article and just came over here to read the comments. Am not sure what it shows (that my reading habits have become perfunctory or the writing doesn't lend easily to visualization) and so i will shut up. :P -- as someone else hinted at.

Patient0 14y ago

Yes the overall tone of the article was clear that it was "this is what you shouldn't do" - but I read it as implying that somehow this rube-goldberg-esque contraption was arrived at by a series of logical and reasonable steps, one of which would have been "re-write the REST layer because HTTP is slow". So it was kinda implying that this was actually a reasonable step to take in isolation... My problem with the statement "HTTP is slow": All of the reasons why an HTTP connection might be giving poor performance (serialization costs, SSL encryption costs, TCP latency) are not intrinsic to HTTP and would be a problem for any protocol that goes over the network. So it's almost never accurate to say "HTTP is slow". Anyway thanks for sharing the write up. It's easy to sneer and say "what a bunch of clueless idiots!" but when I think back on some of the stuff I did when I was first starting out as a programmer and thought I was shit-hot: * My first ever experiment with Yacc ended up in a "scheduler" with a custom dependency language for expressing the dependencies, used to schedule our whole overnight batch processing * After learning about smart pointers in C++, I knew that they were the way to go! I happily wrote: std::vector<std::auto_ptr<T>> - it was only a year after I had resigned that my (ex) boss, who was still on friendly terms, calls me up to query why the latest version of the C++ compiler won't compile this code.... "Did I write this? What the fuck was I thinking!?" * I think my first Java class was a very complicated thing that, at the end of the day, allowed one to "more easily" write code to read a CSV file... Well, it's all a learning experience! </shudder>

DRMacIver 14y ago
I'm not sure I would call the steps "reasonable" per se. They're much more obviously bad ideas in retrospect than they were at the time, but a lot of them should have been pretty obviously bad ideas at the time as well. On the HTTP is slow thing: I think I was pretty clear in the write up that we had failed to performance test and it wasn't at all clear that our replacement was faster. I think these are sufficient disclaimers that I was pretty obviously labelling it "HEY DON'T DO IT THIS WAY" :-)
- triplesec 14y ago
  this is where code gets to be a bit like dating and general human interaction. "it seemed like a good idea at the time".

triplesec 14y ago

Up to a point, McGyver. I'm a Brit and I missed the "it's obviously terrible", but I could here the ironic amusement at your own former selves and prepared for the worst. I'm admittedly not the world's greatest developer, and this makes me realise why many may miss your subtlety in this case: it's blindingly obvious only to those who are knowledgeable enough, or where an author cannily signals to lesser mortals that there is trouble ahead. I suspect you just signalled marginally too little for the mean audience. This is a board read by lots of sorts of geeks, and a rhetorical limitation may be that your optimal audience may be full-stack devs.