Oldie Programming: Career Advice, Questions, Change of Directions

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Jaded Burnout: Jul 10, 2004

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

Maybe see if you can lobby to hire a coworker?

They have hired one, which is why it's more of a vent of the last 4 months vs actual advice seeking, but surely two non-java devs could figure this stuff out a lot faster than one non-java dev, even if together they're still slower than the one java dev showing up in May.

It's less frustrating than it is exhausting.

# ? Apr 21, 2017 10:25

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# ? May 14, 2024 14:44

Hughlander: May 11, 2005

Arachnamus posted:

I think this is more of a vent than actual advice asking.

I'm contracting for a company that largely does Rails stuff. I largely do Rails stuff. I am currently:
1. 100% remote
2. The only developer on a team. For context the other teams are a) 3 guys doing dev VM and Jenkins stuff, b) all the other developers in the company working on a Rails monolith.
3. The only person of any discipline assigned to that team.
4. Working with a tech neither I nor anyone else in the company is familiar with (Kafka)
5. Working with a new-ish library neither I nor anyone else in the company is familiar with (Kafka Streams)
6. Writing, packaging, and deploying a language neither I nor anyone else in the company is familiar with (Java)
7. Writing puppet and defining infrastructure on some NIH IaaS that's so new it goes down at 55 minutes past every hour to clear a memory leak

Apart from being a recipe for intense isolation it's also incredibly inefficient. They know this isn't my area of expertise and I've told them we could get way more done in other ways but they seem to be happy with me spending two days wrestling with Maven.

I can do it because I've dealt with new tech and new languages enough to be able to pick things up, but it seems like such a waste of my time and their money.

Well if they're paying you to increase your marketable skills, drop maven and use Gradle. if you squint at it a bit it's almost a Rakefile and it's code not XML.

# ? Apr 21, 2017 16:08

Jaded Burnout: Jul 10, 2004

Hughlander posted:

Well if they're paying you to increase your marketable skills, drop maven and use Gradle. if you squint at it a bit it's almost a Rakefile and it's code not XML.

The new guy starting in May is something of a Java greybeard so I'll see what he wants to do.

I tried buildr for a time but it seemed like too much of a thin maven wrapper to not just use maven.

# ? Apr 21, 2017 18:09

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Dropping maven for gradle is one of the worst ideas possible.

# ? Apr 21, 2017 18:32

Hughlander: May 11, 2005

Plorkyeran posted:

Dropping maven for gradle is one of the worst ideas possible.

Maybe, but what I said was "Use a disfunctional org to learn a marketable skill." Which is probably a bit less objectionable.

# ? Apr 21, 2017 18:53

Doctor w-rw-rw-: Jun 24, 2008

Plorkyeran posted:

Dropping maven for gradle is one of the worst ideas possible.

# ? Apr 21, 2017 19:19

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Hughlander posted:

Maybe, but what I said was "Use a disfunctional org to learn a marketable skill." Which is probably a bit less objectionable.

You also don't want to work for a company looking for Gradle knowledge. It's like learning COBOL in that it would help you get jobs, but they aren't jobs you want.

# ? Apr 21, 2017 21:36

Pixelboy: Sep 13, 2005; Now, I know what you're thinking...

Plorkyeran posted:

It's like learning COBOL in that it would help you get jobs, but they aren't jobs you want.

I don't know... I just had a $180k/yr position float by that was COBOL based. I'm sure I could learn to cope as I rolled around in my phat stacks....

# ? Apr 21, 2017 21:38

Jose Valasquez: Apr 8, 2005

10 years from now young COBOL experts are going to make crazy amounts of money in the financial industry

# ? Apr 21, 2017 23:59

fantastic in plastic: Jun 15, 2007; The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.

I look forward to the JavaScript vs COBOL turf wars of 2027.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 00:22

Ghost of Reagan Past: Oct 7, 2003; rock and roll fun

fantastic in plastic posted:

I look forward to the JavaScript vs COBOL turf wars of 2027.

Well, COBOL is definitely superior to JS as a web dev language

https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair

# ? Apr 22, 2017 01:00

Skandranon: Sep 6, 2008; fucking stupid, dont listen to me

fantastic in plastic posted:

I look forward to the JavaScript vs COBOL turf wars of 2027.

My retirement plan.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 01:29

Blinkz0rz: May 27, 2001; MY CONTEMPT FOR MY OWN EMPLOYEES IS ONLY MATCHED BY MY LOVE FOR TOM BRADY'S SWEATY MAGA BALLS

Hughlander posted:

Well if they're paying you to increase your marketable skills, drop maven and use Gradle. if you squint at it a bit it's almost a Rakefile and it's code not XML.

This is loving dumb poo poo and you should be ashamed for suggesting it.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 16:09

Doctor w-rw-rw-: Jun 24, 2008

Also, people who think build files should be written in code or a scripting language need to be hurt, badly.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 16:28

Hughlander: May 11, 2005

Blinkz0rz posted:

This is loving dumb poo poo and you should be ashamed for suggesting it.

I'll own up to it. I'm burnt out and projecting my givenofuckatude on others.

Hughlander fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Apr 22, 2017

# ? Apr 22, 2017 16:41

Hughlander: May 11, 2005

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

Also, people who think build files should be written in code or a scripting language need to be hurt, badly.

That I'll disagree with. Any build file is pretty much already going to be turing complete At that point you're just saying "I want to use this limited DSL that people have limited experience in stead of this other DSL that people have slightly more experience in." I can recognize not everyone believing that as well but that's ok. But to my original poor point, in my market at least new projects start with a gradle file at a far higher ratio than those that start with a pom file.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 17:04

Doctor w-rw-rw-: Jun 24, 2008

Okay, amendment: any scriptable build system needs to be super disciplined and strict, lintable and autofixable, else the build system goes completely off the rails in time.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 17:31

Hughlander: May 11, 2005

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

Okay, amendment: any scriptable build system needs to be super disciplined and strict, lintable and autofixable, else the build system goes completely off the rails in time.

I'll do you one better, our Jenkins DSL jobs have unit tests.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 17:33

Blinkz0rz: May 27, 2001; MY CONTEMPT FOR MY OWN EMPLOYEES IS ONLY MATCHED BY MY LOVE FOR TOM BRADY'S SWEATY MAGA BALLS

Beyond making sure that they compile to valid XML how in the world do you unit test them?

e: I'm aware of setting up a job-dsl repo with Gradle, I just can't for the life of me think about what unit testing a DSL file would look like.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 17:39

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

The Maven approach of having build system plugins written in a real programming language combined with an anemic declarative project format is far superior to a turing complete project format. Obviously the degenerate end state is the same (your build system is just a pile of java in a plugin and your project file does nothing but load that plugin), but it does a much better job of making the default thing to do sane.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 18:36

Paolomania: Apr 26, 2006

Does bazel have any traction out in the real world?

# ? Apr 22, 2017 21:37

Good Will Hrunting: Oct 8, 2012; I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.

Paolomania posted:

Does bazel have any traction out in the real world?

My manager has talked about it (along with Gerrit) but I don't see us switching anytime soon tbh.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 22:07

Ghost of Reagan Past: Oct 7, 2003; rock and roll fun

How widely used is Elasticsearch? Is it popular? I'm working with it a bunch (along with some other tech) and I like working with it quite a bit, so I'm thinking of digging more deeply into it. But since I have a bunch of options at work, I'd like whatever database technologies I dig into to look good on a resume down the road.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 23:33

Hughlander: May 11, 2005

Ghost of Reagan Past posted:

How widely used is Elasticsearch? Is it popular? I'm working with it a bunch (along with some other tech) and I like working with it quite a bit, so I'm thinking of digging more deeply into it. But since I have a bunch of options at work, I'd like whatever database technologies I dig into to look good on a resume down the road.

It's the backbone of both graylog and ELK. Any place that doesn't use Splunk will probably have some elastisearch.

# ? Apr 22, 2017 23:37

Doctor w-rw-rw-: Jun 24, 2008

Buck has some traction outside Facebook, and my expectations are that it will grow in popularity in time.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 00:04

Mniot: May 22, 2003; Not the one you know

Ghost of Reagan Past posted:

How widely used is Elasticsearch? Is it popular? I'm working with it a bunch (along with some other tech) and I like working with it quite a bit, so I'm thinking of digging more deeply into it. But since I have a bunch of options at work, I'd like whatever database technologies I dig into to look good on a resume down the road.

I think it's a good pick. A quick metric is that AWS sells managed ES clusters. They wouldn't bother if they didn't have a lot of customers deploying them. We added it to our stack somewhat recently at my office, and while I don't have much contact with it I know that it was viewed as the obvious choice and that the people who do work with it have been generally pleased.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 00:56

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

Also, people who think build files should be written in code or a scripting language need to be hurt, badly.

Gulp, in JavaScript, is impressively terrible, especially when generating RPMs with something called Brass, however SCons in Python is pretty sweet. I think the differentiation is that webdev land stuff have terrible docs and a certain level of brain damage.

It's concise, but just too terse, the options for each parameter are completely opaque to me.

JavaScript code:

gulp.task('service', [ 'setup' ], function () {
    return gulp.src(brass.util.assets('service/systemd'))
    .pipe(brass.util.template(options.service))
    .pipe(brass.util.rename(options.service.name +'.service'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest(path.join(rpm.buildRoot, '/lib/systemd/system')))
    .pipe(rpm.files());
});

MrMoo fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Apr 23, 2017

# ? Apr 23, 2017 01:58

Skandranon: Sep 6, 2008; fucking stupid, dont listen to me

MrMoo posted:

Gulp, in JavaScript, is impressively terrible, especially when generating RPMs with something called Brass, however SCons in Python is pretty sweet. I think the differentiation is that webdev land stuff have terrible docs and a certain level of brain damage.

It's concise, but just too terse, the options for each parameter are completely opaque to me.
JavaScript code:
gulp.task('service', [ 'setup' ], function () {
    return gulp.src(brass.util.assets('service/systemd'))
    .pipe(brass.util.template(options.service))
    .pipe(brass.util.rename(options.service.name +'.service'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest(path.join(rpm.buildRoot, '/lib/systemd/system')))
    .pipe(rpm.files());
});

Then I think your problem is more with the documentation for Brass? The Gulp parts make perfect sense to me. One thing that can help a little is referencing d.ts files (if they exist) in your gulpfile.js. VSCode will give you a fairly decent amount of type info and call signatures, even without having to run through the TypeScript compiler.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 03:02

Ghost of Reagan Past: Oct 7, 2003; rock and roll fun

Mniot posted:

I think it's a good pick. A quick metric is that AWS sells managed ES clusters. They wouldn't bother if they didn't have a lot of customers deploying them. We added it to our stack somewhat recently at my office, and while I don't have much contact with it I know that it was viewed as the obvious choice and that the people who do work with it have been generally pleased.

Welp, guess it's time to learn Java :shrug:

E: I mean, I'd have to learn a new language for most databases except, like, Riak or Couch, so

Ghost of Reagan Past fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Apr 23, 2017

# ? Apr 23, 2017 03:07

oliveoil: Apr 22, 2016

MrMoo posted:

Gulp, in JavaScript, is impressively terrible, especially when generating RPMs with something called Brass, however SCons in Python is pretty sweet. I think the differentiation is that webdev land stuff have terrible docs and a certain level of brain damage.

It's concise, but just too terse, the options for each parameter are completely opaque to me.
JavaScript code:
gulp.task('service', [ 'setup' ], function () {
    return gulp.src(brass.util.assets('service/systemd'))
    .pipe(brass.util.template(options.service))
    .pipe(brass.util.rename(options.service.name +'.service'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest(path.join(rpm.buildRoot, '/lib/systemd/system')))
    .pipe(rpm.files());
});

Are you familiar with rpmbuild? If not, maybe it would make more sense if you were? THere's a gulp-brass GitHub (https://github.com/monai/gulp-brass#introduction) that says "This is a wrapper around rpmbuild command and SPEC file generator done in gulp way." I suspect that it would make more sense if you were familiar with rpmbuild, but it's just a hunch as I don't know anything about any of this.

EDIT: Actually, it looks like your example was taken form that GitHub repo: https://github.com/monai/gulp-brass#services

# ? Apr 23, 2017 03:31

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

Ghost of Reagan Past posted:

Welp, guess it's time to learn Java

E: I mean, I'd have to learn a new language for most databases except, like, Riak or Couch, so

You don't need to learn Java to work with ElasticSearch. All it does is exposes an HTTP API, which can be called from any language. Nothing fancy.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 12:06

Ghost of Reagan Past: Oct 7, 2003; rock and roll fun

Volguus posted:

You don't need to learn Java to work with ElasticSearch. All it does is exposes an HTTP API, which can be called from any language. Nothing fancy.

Oh I wasn't clear, I'd like to actually try and contribute to it, too. It's a good API, though, big fan.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 12:35

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

Ghost of Reagan Past posted:

Oh I wasn't clear, I'd like to actually try and contribute to it, too. It's a good API, though, big fan.

Oh, I wasn't aware that ElasticSearch was opensource. Apache Lucene (the search engine library upon which ElasticSearch is built) is opensource though, under an Apache licence, so at least you could contribute there.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 14:36

necrobobsledder: Mar 21, 2005; Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll; Nap Ghost

Anyone trying to create OS distribution packages should probably be using fpm

# ? Apr 23, 2017 15:06

in a well actually: Jan 26, 2011; dude, you gotta end it on the rhyme

necrobobsledder posted:

Anyone trying to create OS distribution packages should probably be using fpm

Coincidentally, by the same guy who made the logstash part of the elk stack.

# ? Apr 23, 2017 15:33

BurntCornMuffin: Jan 9, 2009

Plorkyeran posted:

Dropping maven for gradle is one of the worst ideas possible.

...I actually disagree with this. I enjoy Gradle's flexibility, and it looks a lot prettier/easier to read.

POMs on the other hand, like most XML in my experience, look hideous to me. I know how to work with them, and I appreciate all they do, but it's simply ugly to me.

# ? Apr 24, 2017 14:43

Blinkz0rz: May 27, 2001; MY CONTEMPT FOR MY OWN EMPLOYEES IS ONLY MATCHED BY MY LOVE FOR TOM BRADY'S SWEATY MAGA BALLS

All I really want in this world is a beautiful build tool am I rite? :troll:

# ? Apr 24, 2017 16:20

leper khan: Dec 28, 2010; Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Blinkz0rz posted:

All I really want in this world is a beautiful build tool am I rite?

I'm going to go with 'no'.

# ? Apr 24, 2017 18:15

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

For the "skills" section of my resume, do I put things like languages I know there, or do I put fields/technologies I'm familiar with like "back-end" or "APIs"?

# ? Apr 24, 2017 18:18

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# ? May 14, 2024 14:44

leper khan: Dec 28, 2010; Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Pollyanna posted:

For the "skills" section of my resume, do I put things like languages I know there, or do I put fields/technologies I'm familiar with like "back-end" or "APIs"?

AB test it with recruiters. See who gives you more call backs.

It typically doesn't matter.

# ? Apr 24, 2017 18:21

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