Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

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Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Agreed. Having many smaller PR's instead of one big honking PR would be my preference. I won't object to people cleaning things up, but if it's one of these massive refactors that touch a lot of files then it starts obfuscating all your *real* changes and potential logic bugs that may have crept in. At some point my eyes will start glazing over and it becomes really hard to reason about any of these changes.

I assume you still have passing tests, right? :smug:

# ¿ Oct 4, 2016 14:10

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 02:55

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Slash posted:

could be resolved by just talking to people.

Quoted for emphasis. If you are unsure of things, or you're worried person X might think thought Y, why not just TALK to them?

# ¿ Oct 7, 2016 15:05

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Vulture Culture posted:

it's not like there's a dev/prod disconnect where we're just sitting on these huge feature branches until January 1.

We do have this disconnect in the sense that we're still working on new features, but our production branch now only gets some cherry picked stability and performance improvements. We have so much to do we can't afford to just sit around and this way of working is pretty decent.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 23:02

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

New Yorp New Yorp posted:

Yes. Bugs should be prioritized, given point estimates, and assigned to sprints.

How do you give a point estimate to a bug if you're not even sure what's causing the bug? Don't those estimates end up being glorified timeboxes?

# ¿ Jan 4, 2017 10:55

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

leper khan posted:

All estimates are glorified time boxes?

Excellent point

# ¿ Jan 4, 2017 12:48

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

But if you have zero-point bugs and your velocity goes down because of that, isn't that then a valid metric as well? I mean, it shows you're spending more and more time fixing bugs than actually working on stories, which seems like a very useful indication that somewhere in the development process (not necessarily development) something is not going as planned.

You shouldn't be chastised for the drop in velocity obviously, that makes little sense.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2017 17:19

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

At least make sure the test is descriptive. This way you'll know in six months time *why* Foo needs to equal Bar on Mondays.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2017 23:47

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Right. What makes it so hard to just ask for a *single* requirements doc? Is it fear of confrontation or arguing with a superior?

# ¿ Apr 22, 2017 20:13

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

A colleague of mine is presenting there, I'll ask if there are some codes to pass around.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2017 22:11

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Keetron posted:

If you are still around on Thursday, there is a meetup.com hands-on test tooling workshop at bol.com where I will be a TA on the FitNesse automation framework.

And speaking of bol.com, I work there and we're always looking for talented people and can assist with your move to The Netherlands. For a fairly large company we have managed to avoid most agilefall traps (most...) and it's a friendly work atmosphere. PM for details

# ¿ Jun 11, 2017 12:54

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

No, but there will be plenty of colleagues there.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2017 20:26

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Docjowles posted:

Out of curiosity, is this for EU candidates, or does bol help with relocation worldwide?

I think it's worldwide. I have colleagues from China, Ukraine, South Africa, the US. Basically every lunch brings new chances to accidentally offend someone in a different way :allears:

# ¿ Jun 12, 2017 09:26

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Cancelbot posted:

Why does your plaza API always break

I'll have to plead ignorance about that. You're welcome to come and fix it?

It's one of the areas in the company that's in heavy flux and there are many conflicting requirements that the team is trying to unironically agilefall to success. Especially in the area of test automation they could use some help, I think.

Carbon dioxide posted:

Hey bol.com guys your talk today at Goto was good and cool.

Was that the resilience one? Feedback is welcome!

# ¿ Jun 14, 2017 21:02

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Keetron posted:

Dutch Amazon but with out AWS and with a European Socialist work culture. There is a very strong no-assholes rule in place and your personality and ability to work in teams is as ik important as your technical skills. They would never hire me.

I'm not sure, Keetron :ohdear:

But the hiring policy is definitely VERY aware of culture fit. And quite frankly this is what makes it (to me) a nice place to work. There are many many (many) things that could be improved, but there is definitely very little drama in the sense of "person X doesn't respond to my input and just does what he/she/them/it wants waah".

To me this always feels like the most difficult part for a organization that grows beyond a certain size: How do you make sure you keep the culture intact? So far they're doing a pretty good job. It also does NOT mean that the only people that work here are incredibly social and our offices are full of rainbows and safe spaces and trigger warnings. It's just that you need to be able to work in *a team*. Depending on your personality you can work in a team full of very outgoing people. It could also mean you get to work with 5 nerds/nerdettes discussing the latest Game of Thrones/Walking Dead crossover fanfic.

Carbon dioxide posted:

@Sagacity, while we're talking about stuff like this, can you please come over and fix our ops guys who seem to be afraid of new technologies? (they're really good at what they do and we couldn't do without them but there are some days...)

Depends on the technology? It's not necessarily bad to be conservative, especially when you're automating your IT landscape. Not sure if that's the case here though :eng101:

# ¿ Jun 15, 2017 09:00

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

geeves posted:

That's what Lombok does? Holy poo poo. I've heard of it, but haven't really delved into it too much. Definitely going to see about getting this in.

It's quite delicious. Another good alternative is the Immutables library. It works by generating code instead of weaving bytecode like Lombok.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2017 12:32

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Yes, that's totally not insane at all.

How does management react when you bring that up?

# ¿ Aug 4, 2017 18:47

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Keetron posted:

Ok but 3 or 4 or 5 spaces?

Exactly.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2017 22:00

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

At my current job we're actually building an opinionated library on top of Spring Boot. First, to codify best practices, i.e. preconfigure Spring Boot (things like Jackson serialization settings etc). Second, to provide clean Springesque abstractions on top of our (partially custom) infrastructure components. Third, to help people fall into the "pit of success" when they just use our defaults. By just including a parent pom the service will build, create a docker container and be fully deployable.

Hiding this behind a set of libraries does mean that it's trickier to build or debug than when you're just copy/pasting features you like from other services, but it's gradually picking up steam and becoming more stable. The people that are just using the library are quite happy with it and the more adventurous developers are also starting to contribute to the library itself.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2017 09:58

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

The application can then just communicate with the DAL by passing command name and args, and the database can decide what actual SQL to execute should be.

Are you serious? How do you deploy and version control this clown car of a development strategy? How do you even pass arguments and receive results in your code if you have to assume the database code can change at any time?

I mean, I'm all for DBAs being able to write decent queries but this seems...unideal.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2017 16:51

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

Welcome to enterprise software. It makes perfect sense when you have customers that run 15 year old versions of the database and refuse to upgrade but still want to use the new client and have it be compatible with the old system.

Wow. I work in an enterprise as well, but I guess it's the right kind of enterprise. We've managed to slowly replace various huge Oracle systems (literally everything was written in PL/SQL) with Java services. It's been a huge hassle but we can now add new features much easier than before and everything is way more reliable.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2017 10:44

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Pollyanna posted:

New job has a codebase that only works locally if you use Webstorm. I miss Atom.

Well, you almost it through your first week. Good luck resuming the job hunt!

# ¿ Nov 22, 2017 11:48

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

KoRMaK posted:

Just some meta feedback about some of your posts in here, but they frequently seem to ask questions that can't be objectively answered. You should talk to your team about those kind of things, instead of internet people. Your code base could be arbitrarily complicated or simple, we would have no idea.

A thousand times this. So many of your questions or concerns could be addressed by just *talking to people*. Maybe it's easier because you're remote now and the barrier may be a bit lower? It's kinda like writing on SA except with people that know the codebase

# ¿ Nov 27, 2017 11:18

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

CPColin posted:

Rule of thumb: avoid programming languages that brag on their home page about not needing semicolons.

Yes, I've also never understood why semicolons are so terribly bad. It reminds me of the insanity regarding the automatic semicolon insertion in Javascript.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2017 16:59

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Pollyanna posted:

Development process is predictably garbage at my new job.

Just curious: Did you not ask about how their process works when you were interviewing?

# ¿ Dec 8, 2017 14:24

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

gitlab-ci is pretty decent, and I can recommend it. It beats having to host all these tools separately (or paying through the nose for Atlassian stuff).

# ¿ Jan 15, 2018 15:25

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Use tabs instead of spaces 50% of the time

# ¿ Feb 5, 2018 15:19

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Product owner: "Okay fine, I'll give you a timebox of one day to add some alerts BUT THAT'S IT"

# ¿ Mar 28, 2018 10:20

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

ratbert90 posted:

You will be expected to do the work of your coworkers from now on without extra pay or compensation.

It�s a bad idea. Feel free to look at the code and learn it yourself, but do not make merge requests.

That's a pretty toxic attitude. Nobody is talking about taking on extra work. If you spend your time working on fixing features in another team's service, that would just mean that you're spending less time in that sprint working on your own service. In both cases you are contributing to the end result and towards value towards your stakeholder, so why would that be a problem?

Interacting with other people is a good thing! :bignews:

# ¿ May 2, 2018 14:54

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Vulture Culture posted:

Ah, "I'm being racist but am I being racist enough to consider this a big problem", the hardest problem in open source

Unironically I think stuff like this and all the related drama is becoming a bit of an issue in open source.

# ¿ May 11, 2018 14:43

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

New Yorp New Yorp posted:

He doesn't understand how to write good unit tests, either.

No, you see, this is just another form of TDD. Write tests first, see them fail. Six months later, see them pass(*).

* Lol

# ¿ May 30, 2018 07:21

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Yes, best to avoid opportunities to forge a lifelong friendship, fellow Dutchies!

# ¿ Jun 18, 2018 21:21

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

I've found this behaviour as well. Mostly in people that are 'kind of senior': They know how to solve certain technical challenges, but they don't spend the time to stand back, look at the code and say 'okay, I've solved the problem but is this complexity REALLY needed?'

# ¿ Jul 6, 2018 09:00

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Pollyanna posted:

This is right around where I am, except I�ve started catching that �is this too much� thing early.

Or perhaps you're slowly becoming a senior developer? :thunk:

# ¿ Jul 6, 2018 14:36

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

This reminds me of the job opening I once saw that said:

quote:

You don't have to think outside the box, because there *is* *no* *box*!

# ¿ Jul 20, 2018 14:09

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

Volmarias posted:

Ah, I see you too have faced my greatest nemesis, the forgotten import from java.util that you used to test something out.

The nemesis whose only weakness is the "Optimize imports before committing" checkbox in IntelliJ!

# ¿ Aug 5, 2018 17:26

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

I can confirm that IntelliJ is cool and good and easily surpasses things like Visual Studio and (low bar) Eclipse.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2018 14:34

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

America's strong "the government shouldn't mandate ANYTHING! SMALL GOVERNMENT!" mentality isn't really good for employees, who knew?

Thankfully you have well-organized health care and subsidized college education, am I right?

# ¿ Aug 10, 2018 09:13

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

necrobobsledder posted:

In theory, yes. In practice, I�ve normally observed that the team will upgrade at the slightest sign of a fix happening in an internal library while external updates languish for years.

I'm a maintainer/developer on the main $FRAMEWORK we use at $DAYJOB and the way we've done is it by building it on top of Spring Boot, which brings in a whole bunch of dependency management already. So if someone upgrades to the latest version of $FRAMEWORK they automatically get a whole bunch of third-party dependency upgrades as well. This occasionally breaks because things are incompatible, but generally the Spring folks make sure they only upgrade to compatible versions. It's working quite well so far.

necrobobsledder posted:

middle managers externalize the maintenance of the core library because they�re too busy shipping features

This is definitely harder to do. The way we've set this up is that people can apply for "fellowships". If they want to work on a feature in $FRAMEWORK that they can demonstrably use in their team (and would be useful for the rest of the company as well, making it eligible for inclusion in the framework) then we will handle the "negotiating with the manager" part. It's still tricky and I'd love people to feel a bit more ownership for $FRAMEWORK apart from doing minor documentation merge requests, but it's improving over time.

All of this is completely different to $LAST_FRAMEWORK where our internal developers' community wasn't involved at all and it was basically one senior developer (possibly in an ivory tower) working on a framework filled with features that nobody wanted or cared about, and not built on top of an extensible base so it basically bitrotted away.

For $FRAMEWORK we've invested from day 1 in having decent documentation that's always up-to-date, release notes that contain upgrade documentation for possibly breaking changes, providing at least biweekly releases (and often more) and organizing community meetings every couple of months, etc. It took a lot of time, but it's worth it imo.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2019 21:31

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

You could argue the Facebook API works so well the data ends up literally everywhere

# ¿ Apr 4, 2019 17:33

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 02:55

Sagacity: May 2, 2003; Hopefully my epitaph will be funnier than my custom title.

You've essentially reinvented a worse version of gRPC then

# ¿ Apr 4, 2019 22:01

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Working in Development: Leaving sounds like a great decision.

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