by jdorfman on 3/21/24, 8:23 PM with 41 comments
by armchairhacker on 3/21/24, 9:42 PM
What’s actually happening is that there are a lot of bloated, buggy, badly-designed programs today because they simply wouldn’t have existed prior to the improvements in developer tooling. In some cases because the software has a much broader scope made possible by the tooling (distributed “webscale” sites with massive data throughput and configurability). Alternatively (or additionally), sometimes the developer(s) are mistakenly using a tool (e.g. Kubernetes) that is way too webscale/generalized for their purpose and/or itself wouldn’t have existed prior to improvements in development tooling.
Good software still exists today. It’s just gold lying around in a forest of junk, whereas it used to be more like less-shiny gold lying around in a barren plain.
by calrain on 3/21/24, 9:56 PM
This is why I've started digging deep into setting up a homelab environment, with the goal to be implementing local source control, automation pipelines, AI inference models, and hosting.
I feel it's important to keep skills fresh rather than paying others to do.
It is important to focus on what you're good at, but it's also important to know what is really going on at the infrastructure layer.
BTW. on premise compute for homelab environments is incredibly cheap right now! (Looking at you 'second hand Dell Optiplex' gear)
by slily on 3/21/24, 9:54 PM
It's an improvement from a certain baseline, but Visual Studio set a higher bar for me personally.
by bigyikes on 3/22/24, 2:43 AM
This… is not the primary benefit of type systems. (Not sure I’d agree that this is even an actual benefit - my mental model of a system is unaffected by the presence of types)
In my view, the primary benefit of type systems is that it makes changing code significantly easier, much in the same way that test cases do. They give you confidence that a code change doesn’t cause a regression. Refactoring a code base without types is nightmare fuel. This is not hype.
by packetlost on 3/21/24, 9:43 PM
This isn't really an assessment on the utility of IDEs. I think they're a net positive for the people that get benefit from them.
by doctor_eval on 3/21/24, 9:50 PM
My experience as a single developer on a new project is that the usability of K8s has improved dramatically in the last decade.
I use Vultr VKS; setting up a small cluster takes a few minutes, it’s super cheap, and now I have a deployment environment with automatic redundancy, zero downtime upgrades, and much more.
It’s not perfect, but I absolutely love it, and it’s made my life so much easier. I do hate yaml with a passion, and there’s a lot of boilerplate, but IDEs and templates make it bearable, and in any case it’s a small price to pay for all the automation I get.
by irrational on 3/21/24, 10:30 PM
The vast majority of PR/commit messages I see (approaching 100%) are basically a JIRA ticket number and the name of the ticket, and that message is used over and over again for multiple commits under that same ticket. I'm not sure Copilot could do any worse.
by xnx on 3/21/24, 10:29 PM
I feel this. There are a lot of PaaS options, but very little portability between them.
by politelemon on 3/21/24, 10:11 PM
Everything is a lock-in of some kind or to a degree, even k8s or EC2s can be depending on the complexity, of which there exists heaps in k8s. It's a different kind of lock-in, the self inflicted variety.
by givemeethekeys on 3/21/24, 10:35 PM
by LeBit on 3/21/24, 11:07 PM
What's wrong with developing software knowing it will be hosted on a k8s cluster?
You can install a local k8s cluster will plenty of tools helping you with secrets management, observability, ingress, scaling, storage.
Why the hate?