dondraper36

Joined 5 years ago

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207
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Jan 18
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Comment · 17 days ago
I am not suicidal and I am lucky to have loving people who I also love around. That said, with all the rapid changes in the software engineering industry and in life in general, I sometimes wonder what I am doing with my life and why.

It's like plenty of things are happening by inertia, but none of them bring any joy or make lots of sense. In such moments, I really envy people who have the courage to work on something they truly believe in. I have quite a few people to take care of, which requires financial resources, so I am not there yet.

Comment · 3 months ago
The idea sounds related to the distinction between essential and accidental complexity.

https://ferd.ca/complexity-has-to-live-somewhere.html

I really like the article above in that complexity does have to live somewhere. If you have a hard problem to solve, there is a minimum level of complexity (essential complexity) that can't be further reduced, only moved from one place to another.

And yet we often add accidental complexity by making bad choices (thinking of you, microservices). If your choice is bad enough, you get all the disadvantages (challenges with distributed systems, complicated debugging), but without any of its advantages (a distributed monolith doesn't get you any deployment or team independence).

Telling one from the other, well, is something I'd like to learn and that seems to require both experience and some sort of intuition.

Comment · 6 months ago
If I understood correctly, the queue implementation in the blog post holds a transaction while an operation is in progress.

I see the advice to make it as short as possible, but why can’t we update the status column to, say, “processing” and avoid potentially long transactions at all?

Comment · 7 months ago
Not a novel idea, but it always resonates with me when I hear that the goal of every software engineer is to manage complexity.

That said, I still find it hard to formulate for myself how to tell the difference between accidental and essential complexity.

Comment · 7 months ago
It’s a fantastic performance booster for a lot of mundane tasks like writing and revising design docs, tests, debugging (using it like a super smart and active rubber duck), and system design discussions.

I also use it as a final check on all my manually written code before sending it for code review.

With all that said, I have this weird feeling that my ability to quickly understand and write code is no longer noticeable, nor necessary.

Everyone now ships tons of code and even if I do the same without any LLM, the default perception will be that it has been generated.

I am not depressed about it yet, but it will surely take a while to embrace the new reality in its entirety

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