5 ms·

I'm a corporate neckbeard. Probably the opposite of everyone here. And a lurker, so hello! I work for a company that ignored the industry trends, we picked a w

I'm a corporate neckbeard. Probably the opposite of everyone here. And a lurker, so hello! I work for a company that ignored the industry trends, we picked a winner with "Petzold style" win32 as you put it. We have a 800kloc 20 year old codebase for a LOB product that hasn't had to be rewritten four times due to the abstraction of the hour being changed. No VB, MFC, no ATL, no Winforms, no C#, no WPF, no ASP, barely any COM. The biggest irony of all of our intentional ignorance of technological progress is that our software works 100% perfectly on Wine on OSX and Linux. It also compiles with GCC under mingw32 and works natively on ReactOS bar a few problems with the OS. Do all these magical abstractions and platforms do you any good? I'm less convinced every day. You're right about mindshare though and as a vendor, that is what pays the bills. Going to fire up textpad, nmake, windbg and write some code now...

gtirloni 12y ago
What's the learning curve like for a junior developer joining your company to work on this 800kloc product?
- zamalek 12y ago
  10mloc product here, about 1 month for a university rookie. Once you get over, I guess, 500kloc you start having teams with extremely distinct responsibilities (50kloc to 800kloc depending on the complexity of each team's responsibility). This means that you only need to care about your slice of the product. Knowing what's going on with the other systems makes you immensely more productive, but you can actually get places with just knowing your slice. In terms of mastering the entire codebase? Most likely 6 years: that's about how long it took me. It's a very strange place to say this, but working on a massive codebase (as opposed to a startup) gives you a very rewarding skillset. I would definitely recommend it if you are considering diving into a massive existing codebase. At the end of the day, the more you know [how to do]...
- monstermonster 12y ago
  Well I was the last hire in 2004 and we don't have anyone junior in our 3 person team so I can't answer that really other than a ballpark figure. A good win32 programmer with sector experience could probably jump straight in. Someone with no experience of win32 and the sector would probably be 6 months of work for them and us which isn't a problem. We interviewed one guy in 2010 who was a "rockstar" win32 and C# programmer (apparently) who wanted a pile of cash and came well recommended. We dumped him on a machine with notepad and the windows SDK and documentation. No visual studio. He didn't even get a message box on the screen. We just paid the guy who was leaving a pile more cash and I suspect that was his ploy anyway. That's our only problem!
jeditobe 12y ago
Please visit jira.reactos.org (registration on reactos.org required) and fill bug reports for your problems.
- monstermonster 12y ago
  Will do!

gtirloni 12y ago

What's the learning curve like for a junior developer joining your company to work on this 800kloc product?

zamalek 12y ago
10mloc product here, about 1 month for a university rookie. Once you get over, I guess, 500kloc you start having teams with extremely distinct responsibilities (50kloc to 800kloc depending on the complexity of each team's responsibility). This means that you only need to care about your slice of the product. Knowing what's going on with the other systems makes you immensely more productive, but you can actually get places with just knowing your slice. In terms of mastering the entire codebase? Most likely 6 years: that's about how long it took me. It's a very strange place to say this, but working on a massive codebase (as opposed to a startup) gives you a very rewarding skillset. I would definitely recommend it if you are considering diving into a massive existing codebase. At the end of the day, the more you know [how to do]...
monstermonster 12y ago
Well I was the last hire in 2004 and we don't have anyone junior in our 3 person team so I can't answer that really other than a ballpark figure. A good win32 programmer with sector experience could probably jump straight in. Someone with no experience of win32 and the sector would probably be 6 months of work for them and us which isn't a problem. We interviewed one guy in 2010 who was a "rockstar" win32 and C# programmer (apparently) who wanted a pile of cash and came well recommended. We dumped him on a machine with notepad and the windows SDK and documentation. No visual studio. He didn't even get a message box on the screen. We just paid the guy who was leaving a pile more cash and I suspect that was his ploy anyway. That's our only problem!

jeditobe 12y ago

Please visit jira.reactos.org (registration on reactos.org required) and fill bug reports for your problems.

monstermonster 12y ago
Will do!