<story><title>Anti-patterns and malpractices in modern software development (2015)</title><url>https://web.archive.org/web/20160308032127/https://medium.com/@bryanedds/living-in-the-age-of-software-fuckery-8859f81ca877</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ironmagma</author><text>It’s always fascinating to me how people can get to this point where they eschew new technologies just because there is an older way that works fine. Yes, having a tried and true pipeline is important, but it shouldn’t be surprising that companies are made of people who want their company to push the envelope to further evolve the systems. &lt;i&gt;Someone&lt;/i&gt; was the first person to use Python for a production project, and that evolution has to happen somewhere, with real applications to test them.</text></item><item><author>shantly</author><text>As long as hiring and technology decisions remain largely hype-driven, having someone around who says &amp;quot;we don&amp;#x27;t need k8s, hadoop, machine learning, and AWS with some big-ass Terraform-driven constellation of supporting serices for our expected data, workload, and use case; look, give me one middle-weight server, or one heavyish VM somewhere, and I can show you how to do all this with awk, sed, cron, and maybe a few lines of Perl or Python. We can have it up fast and anyone who can read man pages and a README can admin it, and anyway it&amp;#x27;s so simple and the workload static enough that once some initial kinks are worked out it&amp;#x27;d probably run in a closet without issue for so long you&amp;#x27;d forget it was in there—so, longer than this project is likely to be alive, anyway&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t really something you want unless you plan to ignore them. For their fellow developers, that&amp;#x27;s résumé poison, you &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; experience with all this crap for the next job hunt. For the product manager, owner, and sales, you can&amp;#x27;t baffle stakeholders or investors or prospects with fancy bullshit when there isn&amp;#x27;t any fancy bullshit.</text></item><item><author>petermcneeley</author><text>&amp;quot;I suspect that most discrimination that happens against older programmers is not, in fact, age discrimination, but is, in fact, ‘wisdom discrimination’.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taneq</author><text>It’s always fascinating to me how some people churn from tech to tech, burning most of their time reading docs and fighting with configurations, just because a new technology might be a bit better than the existing, perfectly adequate system.&lt;p&gt;It’s not that things can’t be improved, just that there is so very much low-hanging fruit that has never been implemented at all in a usable manner. We should focus on the huge gains to be made there before the tiny incremental gains to be made by endlessly iterating.</text></comment>
<story><title>Anti-patterns and malpractices in modern software development (2015)</title><url>https://web.archive.org/web/20160308032127/https://medium.com/@bryanedds/living-in-the-age-of-software-fuckery-8859f81ca877</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ironmagma</author><text>It’s always fascinating to me how people can get to this point where they eschew new technologies just because there is an older way that works fine. Yes, having a tried and true pipeline is important, but it shouldn’t be surprising that companies are made of people who want their company to push the envelope to further evolve the systems. &lt;i&gt;Someone&lt;/i&gt; was the first person to use Python for a production project, and that evolution has to happen somewhere, with real applications to test them.</text></item><item><author>shantly</author><text>As long as hiring and technology decisions remain largely hype-driven, having someone around who says &amp;quot;we don&amp;#x27;t need k8s, hadoop, machine learning, and AWS with some big-ass Terraform-driven constellation of supporting serices for our expected data, workload, and use case; look, give me one middle-weight server, or one heavyish VM somewhere, and I can show you how to do all this with awk, sed, cron, and maybe a few lines of Perl or Python. We can have it up fast and anyone who can read man pages and a README can admin it, and anyway it&amp;#x27;s so simple and the workload static enough that once some initial kinks are worked out it&amp;#x27;d probably run in a closet without issue for so long you&amp;#x27;d forget it was in there—so, longer than this project is likely to be alive, anyway&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t really something you want unless you plan to ignore them. For their fellow developers, that&amp;#x27;s résumé poison, you &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; experience with all this crap for the next job hunt. For the product manager, owner, and sales, you can&amp;#x27;t baffle stakeholders or investors or prospects with fancy bullshit when there isn&amp;#x27;t any fancy bullshit.</text></item><item><author>petermcneeley</author><text>&amp;quot;I suspect that most discrimination that happens against older programmers is not, in fact, age discrimination, but is, in fact, ‘wisdom discrimination’.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inimino</author><text>You really missed the point. It&amp;#x27;s not &amp;quot;there is an older way that works fine&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s that there is a simpler way that can be built in less time, takes fewer developers to maintain, will have less bugs, performs better, and is more reliable, because it&amp;#x27;s simpler than all the crap that people want to use. But people will insist on using all the trendy crap because it&amp;#x27;s trendy, FAANG is using it, it looks good on a resume, etc, etc.</text></comment>