HN user
Mostly Python web app programmer, mostly backend
I think this may be a consequence of hiring for a position with the word “architect” in it. It implies the need for complexity vs. Getting a gaggle of senior devs together and letting them sort out CI/CD and patterns as they are needed. In a lot of cases, an architect is not needed but must justify themselves.
Besides this being ineffective for the motivated, it might have a subtle antitrust effect.
As kids find alternative platforms, perhaps they will be vendor locked to them instead of the Meta empire.
This is underappreciated. The number of individual conversations (edges) possible between n engineers (nodes) does not scale linearly.
As a former employee of state and local government, who walked away from both pensions, this was my takeaway.
At the beginning of a project, the government could spend above market for a great architect to lay down the data model and put some patterns in place which could then be reasonably well maintained by below market rate staff, but there are rules and public pressure.
Interestingly, my local govt hired Deloitte to put in a serverless AWS-based application that could have been a simple CRUD app hosted on a medium EC2 instance. It cost $1.5 million and didn’t work, in addition to the hundreds of thousands per year in cloud costs.
Could have been a Django app with Celery. The cost could have been in the low thousands per year.
It could even have been done with a succinct AWS serverless system.
But that’s not the schmooze that can impress high level stakeholders, themselves less familiar with good design patterns, and win the contract.
The Supreme Court has weighed in on this with a little more nuance in their decision in Katz v. United States:
“What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”
This “lack of privacy in public” absolutism would mean that there would never be certiorari granted for these types of cases in the first place.
Reductionist at best, IMO
See also United States v Jones, Carpenter v United States
I think this may be an example of Simpson’s Paradox
To add to this, engineers consider tradeoffs.
You might choose to add comments and let the logic unfold in a less succinct way in order to improve readability and understandability.
You might also consider your colleagues’ limited cognitive reserves, some of which could be spent on more important issues.
I wonder if we are back to “who you know” because of a couple of factors:
1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that
2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail
Cognitive load is super important and should be optimised for. We all should have as our primary objective the taming of complexity.
I was surprised to find an anti-framework, anti-layering perspective here. The author makes good points: it’s costly to learn a framework, costly to break out of its established patterns, and costly when we tightly couple to a framework’s internals.
But the opposite is also true. Learning a framework may help speed up development overall, with developers leaning on previous work. Well designed frameworks make things easy to migrate, if they are expressive enough and well abstracted. Frameworks prevent bad and non-idiomatic design choices and make things clear to any new coder who is familiar with the framework. They prevent a lot of glue, bad abstractions, cleverness, and non-performant code.
Layering has an indirection cost which did not appeal to me at all as a less experienced developer, but I’ve learnt to appreciate a little layering because it helps make predictable where to look to find the source of a bug. I find it saves time because the system has predictable places for business logic, serialisation, data models, etc.
I can unironically imagine legitimate use cases for this idea. I’d wager that many DBs could fit unnoticed into the data footprint of a modern SPA load.
This is super difficult for me to parse. Could you please dumb it down for me?
Unforeseen scope creep is the reason to utilise Django over Flask, I feel.
Also, you can pick and choose what to use in Django similarly to Flask - it just has a higher initial learning curve.
Once you get to sufficient levels of complicated, leaning on established, documented, community supported design patterns and abstractions helps vs. sorting out your imports, making bespoke design choices, and doing a bunch of non-core value producing work.
Once again, and I regret the ad hominem, I find Uncle Bob’s parochial delivery completely distracting from the substance of his message.
Played an entire game even though I need to be doing other things. Your 9 year old has written something super impressive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide
Only thing I’ve read by Voltaire but it slapped.
I found them in 2015 when I was maintaining a legacy app for a university.
The developer that implemented them could have used a few bools but decided to cram it all into one byte using bitwise operators because they were trying to seem smart/clever.
This was a web app, not a microcontroller or some other tightly constrained environment.
One should not have to worry about solar flares! Heh.
Great stack, I use a very similar stack and for the same reasons. I imagine you’re also in your late 30’s.
Honestly the best UI I’ve seen is the terminal-based one at libraries in the 80’s and 90’s that allowed you to find books. Lightning fast and allowed the user to become an expert quickly, especially because the UI essentially never changed.
If you design things with Occam’s razor in mind, a full page reload doesn’t feel like one.
Nowadays I build software to last as long as possible without future investment of time and effort spent on maintenance. Meanwhile the industry seems to have developed some need to mess with their programs all the time. It’s almost like a tic.
I have been both to this site and to Coober Pedy, South Australia. Pretty neat bit of architectural convergent evolution for extremely high temperature environments.
Dr. Murthy understands social media and the headwinds that younger generations are facing.
With this in mind, are we underestimating the devastation awaiting the younger generations?
We have scientists cocksure of natural disasters in the medium term, four decades of increasing economic inequality, cost of living pressure, and in the U.S., and increasingly in other countries, price increases in health, rent, and education.
The kids see empirical evidence of their plight.
I love this.
I also wish that Django would provide native scaffolding a la Laravel and Rails.
Location: San Francisco, CA
Remote: Sure
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Python, Django, AWS/Azure, Celery, PostgreSQL, many more
Résumé/CV: https://ryanchausse.com/cv
Email: chausse@gmail.com
GitHub: https://github.com/ryanchausse
Experienced, curious, polyglot pragmatist. I like medicine, law, government, education, and industrial infrastructure.
Such a policy would improve investment in data security and aligns nicely with our other policy regarding hostage-taking: we don’t negotiate.
I know this says credentials were in a repo but I wonder if this has to do with their self-hosted (EE?) GitLab instance. I've found mine (CE) sort of difficult to upgrade sometimes.
Not sure how they store keys/tokens but it is sort of easy to leak to logs, and perhaps there was some exploit.
Should maybe be using cloud hosted GitLab at their level of scale, even though that option has had problems with uptime among other issues.
A past company used Sisense because the new manager came in penny wise and pound foolish. However, the other ETL/visualization products (e.g. Tableau) truly were expensive. I found Sisense's ETL / viz product to be meh.
Adding a link to a great documentary that includes the process of making paper money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na4FTTK9GPk
That is the weird thing. I think Londoners have little to prove and are thus more relaxed and confident.
In San Francisco, these numbers are wildly cheaper than the reality. Except a broadway musical.
This was my experience as a dual citizen. Sydneysiders are sometimes wannabe Londoners with an odd superiority complex and frequent use of passive aggression.
I have never wanted kids, but I made a very small contribution to Django core, and after it was merged in, I realized that this is the most likely way that I could be remembered as a footnote in history, even if Django is retired from popular use.
A lot of people seek some kind of immortality through reproduction, but this is good enough for me!
I ran a pre-admission (surgery) clinic at a major university hospital through Excel.
VBA is powerful and quick at prototyping/iteration.
I would even venture to say that VB6 was the zenith of CRUD apps
My dude. I taught VB 6 as well as Visual FoxPro in rural Kenya as part of the KASNEB/KNEC national standards.
The immediacy of feedback in these platforms was responsible for many of the enlightened and motivated faces in those classrooms.
Your contributions have global reach and we thank you for them.