Bill is a liability.

Based on some places I used to work, upper management seemed convinced that the "idea" stage was the hardest and most important part of any project, and that the easy part is planning, gathering requirements, building, testing, changing, and maintaining custom business applications for needlessly complex and ever changing requirements.

This is probably going to be similar to Apple's find system, which is a low powered Bluetooth based system. Apple Airtags and powered-off phones just broadcast a "I am here" signal once in a while that other devices can receive and report back to Apple.

I've got so many more stories about bad optimizations. I guess I'll pick one of those.

There was an infamous (and critical) internal application somewhere I used to work. It took in a ton of data, putting it in the database, and then running a ton of updates to populate various fields and states. It was something like,

• Put all data in x table with batch y.
• Update rows in batch y with condition a, set as type a. (just using letters as placeholders for real states)
• Update rows in batch y that haven't been updated and have condition b, set as type b.
• Update rows in batch y that haven't been updated and have condition c, set as type c.
• Update rows in batch y that have condition b and c and condition d, set as type d.
• (Repeat many, many times)

It was an unreadable mess. Trying to debug it was awful. Business rules encoded as a chain of sql updates are incredibly hard to reason about. Like, how did this row end up with that data??

Me and a coworker eventually inherited the mess. Once we deciphered exactly what the rules were and realized they weren't actually that complicated, we changed the architecture to:

• Pull data row by row (instead of immediately into a database)
• Hydrate the data into a model
• Set up and work with the model based on the business rules we painstakingly reverse engineered (i.e. this row is type b because conditions x,y,z)
• Insert models to database in batches

I don't remember the exact performance impact, but it wasn't markedly faster or slower than the previous "fast" SQL-based approach. We found and fixed numerous bugs, and when new issues came up, issues could be fixed in hours rather than days/weeks.

A few words of caution: Don't assume that building things with a certain tech or architecture will absolutely be "too slow". Always favor building things in a way that can be understood. Jumping to the wrong tool "because it's fast" is a terrible idea.

Edit: fixed formatting on Sync

There is a version mismatch. lemmy.world is having trouble upgrading, which I believe also causes federation between instances to fail between these versions.

They have a thread about it here

This is a very strange article to me.

Do some tasks run slower today than they did in the past? Sure. Are there some that run slower without a good reason? Sure.

But the whole article just kind of complains. It never acknowledges that many things are better than they used to be. It also just glosses over the complexities and tradeoffs people have to make in the real world.

Like this:

Windows 10 takes 30 minutes to update. What could it possibly be doing for that long? That much time is enough to fully format my SSD drive, download a fresh build and install it like 5 times in a row.

I don't know what exactly is involved in Windows updates, but it's likely 1) a lot of data unpacking, 2) a lot of file patching, and 3) done in a way that hopefully won't bork your system if something goes wrong.

Sure, reinstalling is probably faster, but it's also simpler. If your doctor told you, "The cancer is likely curable. Here's the best regimen to get you there over the next year", it would be insane to say, "A YEAR!? I COULD MAKE A WHOLE NEW HUMAN IN A YEAR!" But I feel like the article is doing exactly that, over and over.

I'm reluctant to call much "bloat", because even if I don't use something doesn't mean it isn't useful, to other people or future me.

I used to code in vim (plus all sorts of plugins), starting in college where IDEs weren't particularly encouraged or necessary for small projects. I continued to use this setup professionally because it worked well enough and every IDE I tried for the main language I was using wasn't great.

However, I eventually found IDEs that worked for the language(s) I needed and I don't have any interest in going back to a minimalistic (vim or otherwise) setup again. It's not that the IDE does things that can't be done with vim generally, but having a tool that understands the code, environment, and provides useful tooling is invaluable to me. I find being able to do things with some automation (like renaming or refactoring) is so much safer, faster, and enjoyable than doing it by hand.

Features I look for/use most often:

• Go to (both definition and usages)
• Refactor tooling (renaming, inlining, extracting, etc).
• Good warnings, along with suggested solutions. Being able to apply solution is a plus.
• Framework integrations
• User-friendly debugger. Ability to pause, drill in, and interact with data is immensely helpful with the type of applications I work on.
• Configurable breakpoints.
• Build tool integrations. Doing it on the console is... fine... but being able to set up what I need easily in the IDE is preferable.

Features I don't use or care so much about? Is there much left?

• My IDE can hook up to a database. I've tried it a few times, but it never seemed particularly useful for the apps I work on.
• git integration. I have a separate set of tools I normally work with. The ones in my IDE are fine, but I usually use others.
• Profiler. I use it on occasion, but only a few times a year probably.

I do code in non-IDE environments from time to time, but this is almost always because of a lack of tooling than anything else. (Like PICO-8 development)

Yep, absolutely.

In another project, I had some throwaway code, where I used a naive approach that was easy to understand/validate. I assumed I would need to replace it once we made sure it was right because it would be too slow.

Turns out it wasn't a bottleneck at all. It was my first time using Java streams with relatively large volumes of data (~10k items) and it turned out they were damn fast in this case. I probably could have optimized it to be faster, but for their simplicity and speed, I ended up using them everywhere in that project.

While so many things are so much better than they used to be in the programming ecosystem, I feel like entry-level GUI programming is so much worse.

This will probably be an unpopular opinion, but Visual Basic (pre .NET) was one of the easiest ways to make a simple, contemporary (for the time) GUI. Drag and drop some elements, modify the UI properties, double click and add code. It made for an excellent introduction to programming because the UI portions were simple and intuitive enough to stay out of the way.

The rest of VB wasn't great. Weird language/syntax/keywords keywords, closed environment, mediocre tooling. But for building UIs? I haven't used anything as easy as that and it's been over 20 years now...

I don't have any recommendations unfortunately. Almost everything I do is web based or command line. Web UIs aren't terrible, but there's a learning curve and lots of limitations. Haven't found anything for desktop apps I like lately (last one I built was also with tkinter for a small Python project. Bleh.)

I've found pair programming to be fantastic, but only when used rarely in certain situations.

If you've got a good rapport with a teammate and a legacy project has landed in your lap neither of you understand, I've found pair programming to be the fastest way to figure out how it works. As you work together, you'll both understand different parts of it better and be able to quickly figure out what's going on. I guess this is probably less pair-programming and more like collaborative dissection of code though.

I've also used it to help onboard people on a project fairly quickly. This is more tricky and much less comfortable to do, so I do my best to stay in tune with what they need from me, and tends to be me coding for a bit and them following along and asking questions. Eventually, they want to start writing some code, and a day or so of switching back and forth is as far as I've usually taken that. I think it's useful to break down barriers when working with (especially new) people, to make mistakes in front of them, and build good rapport.

I've not used it much beyond those situations, but I'd definitely use it in these ways again.

Nice video about it here : https://youtu.be/cZLed1krEEQ

Tldw: US DOS version actually has 2 separate impossible jumps on a level that aren't present on the European DOS or NES versions.

The opposite actually happened to me. PHP was my first non-intern position. That company eventually started working with Java, so I made that transition when they did.

I've watched so much good code written professionally die because of the whims of leadership in the past.

Java

My take on a modern Java solution (parts 1 & 2).

::: spoiler spoiler

package thtroyer.day1;

import java.util.*;
import java.util.stream.IntStream;
import java.util.stream.Stream;


public class Day1 {
    record Match(int index, String name, int value) {
    }

    Map numbers = Map.of(
            "one", 1,
            "two", 2,
            "three", 3,
            "four", 4,
            "five", 5,
            "six", 6,
            "seven", 7,
            "eight", 8,
            "nine", 9);

    /**
     * Takes in all lines, returns summed answer
     */
    public int getCalibrationValue(String... lines) {
        return Arrays.stream(lines)
                .map(this::getCalibrationValue)
                .map(Integer::parseInt)
                .reduce(0, Integer::sum);
    }

    /**
     * Takes a single line and returns the value for that line,
     * which is the first and last number (numerical or text).
     */
    protected String getCalibrationValue(String line) {
        var matches = Stream.concat(
                        findAllNumberStrings(line).stream(),
                        findAllNumerics(line).stream()
                ).sorted(Comparator.comparingInt(Match::index))
                .toList();

        return "" + matches.getFirst().value() + matches.getLast().value();
    }

    /**
     * Find all the strings of written numbers (e.g. "one")
     *
     * @return List of Matches
     */
    private List findAllNumberStrings(String line) {
        return IntStream.range(0, line.length())
                .boxed()
                .map(i -> findAMatchAtIndex(line, i))
                .filter(Optional::isPresent)
                .map(Optional::get)
                .sorted(Comparator.comparingInt(Match::index))
                .toList();
    }


    private Optional findAMatchAtIndex(String line, int index) {
        return numbers.entrySet().stream()
                .filter(n -> line.indexOf(n.getKey(), index) == index)
                .map(n -> new Match(index, n.getKey(), n.getValue()))
                .findAny();
    }

    /**
     * Find all the strings of digits (e.g. "1")
     *
     * @return List of Matches
     */
    private List findAllNumerics(String line) {
        return IntStream.range(0, line.length())
                .boxed()
                .filter(i -> Character.isDigit(line.charAt(i)))
                .map(i -> new Match(i, null, Integer.parseInt(line.substring(i, i + 1))))
                .toList();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println(new Day1().getCalibrationValue(args));
    }
}

:::

Having used PHP and Java extensively in my career, it's always entertaining to read what people think about these languages.

Best decision I made was taking an internship. I wasn't really looking for one, but through some connections, one basically fell in my lap. It was in old tech I messed with in high school, so I was reluctant, but getting real world programming experience was fantastic. The team was great and I helped solve some interesting problems on a small project of theirs. They kept me on as long as they could (>1 year). I think people can be way to idealistic, especially when starting out. Go get a year or two somewhere, anywhere. You'll have a ton more marketability and control over where you end up with experience and professional references.

Biggest career regret was waiting around afterwards for a time to try to get hired on at that same place. Not a ton of programming jobs locally and I wanted to continue my work there, but the company went through semi-frequent growth/shrink phases, and my team wasn't able to get me hired in, though they did try for a while. There were plenty of other good things happening in my life during the down-time after this job and before the next, so it's not really something I regret, but I definitely won't wait on a company like that again.

Does anyone have any good examples where type erasure is actually a problem?

Absolutely.

I've seen so many projects hindered by bad decisions around performance. Big things like shoehorning yourself into an architecture, language, or particular tool, but even small things like assuming the naive approach is unacceptably slow. If you never actually measure anything though, your assumptions are just assumptions.

I was excited to use assert when I learned about it. I thought it would be ideal for short, clean guard clauses at the top of methods, to fail early on invalid data.

Once I realized that they're configurable and generally seemed to be off by default, they seem completely useless for that scenario. Doubly so when you're working in an environment where you don't control the server environment.

In my experience, Java has a lot fewer breaking changes with upgrades compared to other languages. Compared to Python or even PHP and Java looks slow, steady, and predictable.