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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • You’re not wrong. Having to figure out which element is borked in a yaml file is not great. And the implementation using yaml is all over the place, so even though tools do exist, they’re mediocre at best.

    But, to be fair, Python has always done the same to me. As a fellow Neuro-spicy (and with a background in Java and C# and JavaScript), although the tools are better to point you in the right direction, significant white space (or indentations) are significant white space (or indentations).🤷‍♂️




  • The most compelling argument I heard is that WASM can’t manipulate the DOM and a lot of people don’t want to deal with gluing JS code to it, but aside from that

    But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

    You’ve gotten several other answers that are true and correct - the pain of implementation at this point is greater than the pain points that WASM solves. But this is also a non trivial one - most of what Javascript should be doing on a webpage is DOM manipulation.

    At some point, WASM will either come out with a killer feature/killer app/use case that Javascript (and all the libraries/frameworks out there) hasn’t figured out how to handle, and it will establish a niche (besides “Javascript is sort of a dumb language let’s get rid of it”), and depending on the use case, you might see some of the 17.4 million (estimated) Javascript developers chuck it for…what? Rust? Kotlin? C? C#? But the switching costs are non-trivial - and frankly, especially if you still have to write Javascript in order to manipulate the DOM…well, what are we solving for?

    If you’re writing a web app where one of the WASM languages gives you a real competitive advantage, I’d say that’s your use case right there. But since most web applications are basically strings of api calls looped together to dump data from the backend into a browser, it’s hard to picture wider adoption. I’ve been wrong before, though.


  • For a second I thought my github was going viral. ;)

    This is a hilarious (and interesting!) read.

    As a young(er) and slightly shittier web developer, before I really understood or could implement promises effectively (or when my code would ‘race’ and fail to recognize that the DOM hadn’t been loaded yet, so I couldn’t attach event listeners yet), I was known to implement a 2 second timeout.

    It wasn’t pretty, but it worked!


  • Junior-ish DevOps with some blue/green experience.

    It’s a very thorny problem, and I think your willingness to put up with the trade offs really would drive what patttern of architectecture.

    Most of our blue/green deployment types use a unitary database behind the backend infra. There’s a lot ways to implement changes to the database (mostly done through scripting in the pipeline, we don’t typically use hibernate or other functionality that wants to control the schema more directly), and it avoids the pain of trying to manage consistency with multiple db instances. It helps that most of our databases are document types, so a lot of db changes can be implemented via flag. But I’ve seen some SQL implementations for table changes that lend themselves to blue/green - you just have to be very mindful to not Bork the current live app with what you’re doing in the background. It requires some planning - not just “shove the script into source control and fire the pipeline.”

    If we were using SQL with a tightly integrated schema and/or we couldn’t feature flag, I think we’d have to monkey around with blue/greening the database as well. But consistency is non trivial, especially depending on what kind of app it is. And at least one time when a colleague set up a database stream between AWS accounts, he managed a circular dependency, which….well it wasn’t prod so it wasn’t a big deal, but it easily could’ve been. The data transfer fees are really what kills you. We managed to triple our Dev AWS bill prototyping some database streams at one point. Some of it undoubtedly was inefficient code, but point stands. With most blue/green infra, your actual costs are a lot less than 2x what a ‘unitary’ infra would cost, because most infra is pay for use and isn’t necessary except when you go to deploy new code anyway. But database consistency, at least when we tried it, was way MORE expensive than just 2x the cost of a unitary db, because of the compute and transfer fees.


  • Maybe this is because I’m still relatively junior (2ish years), but my favorite question to ask is, “What are some of the characteristics you’re looking for in someone in this role?”

    I use it as a vibe check, especially at the end of interviews. If they start reading my resume back to me, or listing the things we’ve talked about during the interview…well, that’s a good sign. If they start describing a bunch of stuff that we didn’t talk about, it’s a chance to throw a ‘Hail Mary’ pass and show them how that’s me, as well - maybe we didn’t talk about something that was important to them, but I have relevant experience or a background.

    If they start describing somebody else…well, that’s not great.



  • This kind of implies that you’re crunching and then ‘recovering’. That may or may not be something you have any control over - there’s a lot that goes into creating an unsustainable ‘sprint’, and probably 99.8% of it is not related to actual developers or code - but ideally you would be using these ‘lulls’ to try to pull stuff out of the next crunch so maybe it won’t hurt so bad.

    In reality, if I’m coming off of a bad crunch, I do anything I can do to avoid burnout. Sometimes that’s ‘fun’ backlog items or research for future features or something else I’m excited about, sometimes it’s studying for certs, sometimes it’s cutting slack (@cianuro@programming.dev watching Netflix feels familiar!). But again - whatever it takes to recharge my batteries and feel less bitter and shitty.

    The most ‘sure’ sign that I’m coming off a crunch, though, is that I start reinforcing work/life boundaries. “It’s 5p and I’m logging off and I’m not going to think about work shit willingly until tomorrow.”