douglasg14b

douglasg14b, 1 month ago

This thread is a great example to why despite sharing knowledge we continually fail to write software effectively.

The person you’re arguing with just doesn’t get it. They have their own reality.

douglasg14b, 1 month ago

This is a weird take given that the majority of projects relevant to this article are massive projects with hundreds or thousands of developers working on them, over time periods that can measure in decades.

Pretending those don’t exist and imagining fantasy scenarios where all large projects are made up of small modular pieces (while conveniently making no mention to all of the new problems this raises in practice).

Replace functions replace files and rewrite modules, that’s expected and healthy for any project. This article is referring to the tendency for programmers to believe that an entire project should be scrapped and rewritten from scratch. Which seems to have nothing to do with your comment…?

douglasg14b, 2 months ago

To be fair Microsoft has been working on Garnet for something like 4+ years and have already adopted it internally to reduce infrastructure costs.

Which has been their MO for the last few years. Improve .Net baseline performance, build high performance tools on top of it, dog food them, and then release them under open source licenses.

douglasg14b, 2 months ago

Great timing that Microsoft just released a drop-in replacement that’s in order of magnitude faster: github.com/microsoft/garnet

Written in C# too, so it’s incredibly easy to extend and write performant functions for.

It needs to be a bit more deployable though but they only just opened the repo, so I’ll wait.

douglasg14b, 2 months ago

That’s one of the selling points, yep

douglasg14b, 2 months ago

C# on non-Windows is not impossible, but it’s going to require effort infeasible for school projects like that one.

You mean winforms (The windows specific UI) on non-Windows? Otherwise this is incredibly misleading, and plain wrong.

C# in non windows is the norm, the default even, these days. I build, compile, and run, my C# applications in linux , and have been for the last 5+ years.

douglasg14b, 2 months ago

.Net 8 will work on Linux just fine. But winforms will not, it’s specifically a legacy windows-only UI framework.

You’re going to have to jump through some incredible hoops to get it to work on Linux. Which are definitely not part of your normal curriculum.

douglasg14b, 2 months ago

The designers as seen by designers is so right.

Nothing they come up with can be wrong, it’s all innovative!!

douglasg14b, 5 months ago

IMHO it’s unnecessary at this juncture, and further fragments already vastly under engaged communities (.Net & C#)

Posts about .Net & friends fit into the .Net community. It’s not so busy that a new community needs to break off to direct traffic & posts to.

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This is actually a common failing point/pain point for low traffic or “growing phase” communities & platforms. Fragmentation reduces engagement, and below a certain threshold it just straight dies. Avoiding unnecessary fragmentation until such time as it serves a purpose helps communities grow faster.

To highlight this: the number of mods you are suggesting this community should have to handle TZ coverage is more than the average number of comments on posts in the .Net community today…

douglasg14b, 5 months ago

I go full chaos and look up where I last used it when I need a snippet…

douglasg14b, 2 months ago

I have a weird knack for reverse engineering, and reverse engineering stuff I’ve written 7-10 years ago is even easier!

I tend to be able to find w/e snippet I’m looking for fast enough that I can’t be assed to do it right yet 😆

douglasg14b, 6 months ago

Just a few hundred?

That’s seems awfully short no? We’re talking a couple hours of good flow state, that may not even be a full feature at that point 🤔

We have folks who can push out 600-1k loc covering multiple features/PRs in a day if they’re having a great day and are working somewhere they are proficient.

Never mind important refactors that might touch a thousand or a few thousand lines that might be pushed out on a daily basis, and need relatively fast turnarounds.

Essentially half of the job of writing code is also reviewing code, it really should be thought of that way.

(No, loc is not a unit of performance measurement, but it can correlate)

douglasg14b, 6 months ago

There is no context here though?

If this is a breaking change to a major upgrade path, like a major base UI lib change, then it might not be possible to be broken down into pieces without tripping or quadrupling the work (which likely took a few folks all month to achieve already).

I remember in a previous job migrating from Vue 1 to Vue 2. And upgrading to an entirely new UI library. It required partial code freezes, and we figured it had to be done in 1 big push. It was only 3 of us doing it while the rest of the team kept up on maintenance & feature work.

The PR was something like 38k loc, of actual UI code, excluding package/lock files. It took the team an entire dedicated week and a half to review, piece by piece. We chewet through hundreds of comments during that time. It worked out really well, everyone was happy, the timelines where even met early.

The same thing happened when migrating an asp.net .Net Framework 4.x codebase to .Net Core 3.1. we figured that bundling in major refactors during the process to get the biggest bang for our buck was the best move. It was some light like 18k loc. Which also worked out similarly well in the end .

Things like this happen, not that infrequently depending on the org, and they work out just fine as long as you have a competent and well organized team who can maintain a course for more than a few weeks.

douglasg14b, 6 months ago

Someone who shares their experiences gained from writing real world software, with introspection into the dynamics & struggles involved?

Your age (or mostly career progression, which is correlated) may actually be a reason you have no interest in this.

douglasg14b, 6 months ago

And what does it imply?

That an AI might be better at writing documentation than the average dev, who is largely inept at writing good documentation?

Understandably, as technical writing isn’t exactly a focus point or career growing thing for most devs. If it was, we would be writing much better code as well.

I’ve seen my peers work, they could use something like this. I’d welcome it.

douglasg14b, 6 months ago

Like most large conceptual practices the pain comes when it misused, mismanaged, and misunderstood.

DDD like Agile, when applied as intended, adds more to success than it detracts. This means that others take it and try to use it as a panacea, and inappropriately apply their limited and misunderstood bastardization of it, having the opposite effect.

Which leads to devs incorrectly associating these concepts & processes to the pain they have, instead of recognizing a bad implementation as a bad implementation.

Personally, I’ve found great success by applying DDD where necessary and as needed, modifying it to best fit my needs. (Emphasis mine). I write code with fewer bugs, which is more easily understood, that enforces patterns & separations that improve productivity, faster than I ever have before. This is not because I “went DDD”, it’s because I bought the blue book, read it, and then cherry picked out the parts that work well for my use cases.

And that’s the crux of it. Every team, every application, every job is different. And that difference requires a modified approach that takes DevX & ergonomics into consideration. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, it ALWAYS needs to be picked at and adjusted.

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To answer your question

Yes, I have had lots of pain from DDD. However, following the principals of pain driven development, when that pain arises we reflect, and then change our approach to reduce or eliminate that pain.

Pain is unavoidable, it’s how you deal with it that matters. Do you double down and make it worse, or do you stop, reflect, fix the pain, refactor, and move on with an improved and more enlightened process?

It’s literally just “agile”, but for developer experience.

douglasg14b, 7 months ago

The great thing about languages like C# is that you really don’t need to “catch up”. It’s incredibly stable and what you know about C#8 (Really could get away with C# 6 or earlier) is more than enough to get you through the grand majority of personal and enterprise programming needs for the next 5-10 years.

New language versions are adding features, improving existing ones, and improving on the ergonomics. Not necessarily breaking or changing anything before it.

That’s one of the major selling points really, stability and longevity. Without sacrificing performance, features, or innovation.

douglasg14b, 7 months ago

I do feel like C# saw C++ and said “let’s do that” in a way.

One of the biggest selling points about the language is the long-term and cross repo/product/company…etc consistency. Largely the language will be very recognizable regardless of where it’s written and by who it’s written due to well established conventions.

More and more ways to do the same thing but in slightly different ways is nice for the sake of choices but it’s also making the language less consistent and portable.

While at the same time important language features like discriminated unions are still missing. Things that other languages have started to build features for by default. C# is incredibly “clunky” in comparison to say Typescript solely from a type system perspective. The .Net ecosystem of course more than makes up for any of this difference, but it’s definitely not as enjoyable to work with the language itself.

douglasg14b, 6 months ago

System.Text.Json routinely fails to be ergonomic, it’s quite inconvenient overall actually.

JSON is greedy, but System.Text.Json isn’t, and falls over constantly for common use cases. I’ve been trying it out on new projects every new releases since .net core 2 and every time it burns me.

GitHub threads for requests for sane defaults, more greedy behavior, and better DevX/ergonomics are largely met with disdain by maintainers. Indicating that the state of System.Text.Json is unlikely to change…

I really REALLY want to use the native tooling, that’s what makes .Net so productive to work in. But JSON handling & manipulation is an absolute nightmare still.

Would not recommend.

douglasg14b, 8 months ago

Nevermind PC games, think about how this would impact mobile games. Where you get TONS of transient installs, and very few consistent players.

You could actually go into debt by using unity, and accidentally being successful if you aren’t abusively monitizing your game.

douglasg14b, 8 months ago

Rider is great, it’s 100% worth the money.

Switched over to it this year from VS, it’s so good in comparison. There’s some things that aren’t as nice (the CPU/memory graphs in VS are actually nice and handy). But overall, an upgrade.

douglasg14b, 8 months ago

VS Code honestly kind of sucks for it, there’s just so many small things missing or lacking.

Check out Rider, I was honestly surprised and switched over to it after 8 years of visual studio.

douglasg14b, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Yeah but the ecosystem drags it about as far down as you can go.

Backend development for large applications relies on stability, the JS ecosystem has anything except stability.This is okay for FE development where you naturally have a lot of churn.

It’s a reasonable expectation that a backend built today should be maintenance free and stable over the next 5-10 years if no more features or bugfixes are required. And is buildable, as is, anywhere in that timeframe with minimal or zero additional work.

Additionally, strong backends in the same ecosystem are similar, they use similar technologies, similar configs, similar patterns, and similar conventions. This is not the case for JS/TS backends, there is incredible churn that hurts their long term stability and the low-maintenance requirements of strong enterprise, and even more importantly small businesses backends.

Mature ecosystems provide this by default this is why C#/Java is so popular for these long-standing, massive, enterprise systems. Because they are stable, they have well established conventions, and are consistent across codebases and enterprises.

This is a perspective most devs in the ecosystem lack, given that half of all developers have < 5 years of experience and the vast majority of that is weighted into the JS ecosystem. It takes working with systems written in python, TS, JS, C#, Java…etc to gain the critical insight necessary to evaluate what is actually important in backend development.

Edit: to be clear this isn’t just shitting on JavaScript because that’s what people do, I work with it everyday, TS is by far my favorite language. 2/3 of my career is with JS/TS. This is recognizing actual problems that are not singularly solvable with the ecosystem that pulls down its liability for backend development. There are languages and ecosystems are much better for your back end it’s not that scary to learn a new language (many of my co-workers would disagree it’s not scary 😒)

douglasg14b, 9 months ago

If you do this enough you know how to design your solutions to be relatively flexible. At least for your backends.

Your frontend will always churn, that’s the nature of the job.