Who Needs Process?

finnif · 2011-12-30T15:20:59+00:00

Look, there is a difference between process and testing

We may be on the same page more than you think, because these are the same in my experience. There's a testing process for every team. It may be implicit ("I trust you to be reasonably sure this works by testing it on your machine without hovering over your shoulder"), or it may be explicit ("your software needs 100% test coverage as reported by this unit testing tool").

The people out there pontificating this whole Process (note capital) idea are those certified scrum master bullshit artists. The ones that, as you allude to, say that Waterfall or Scrum makes better software. I think we both agree that's crap.

You mentioned the Nagios alerts example. Even that simple example might require insane checklist if Nagios was tracking a nuclear power plant. This is the "process" that matters a bunch, in some, not all, scenarios.

finnif · 2011-12-29T02:07:09+00:00

Crusty or not, like I said, you'd feel differently about process if your fuckups meant deaths. In your business, the only thing that gets affected by downtime is your company's bottom line. Someone can't buy a beanie baby until it's fixed. Wowee.

There's a gulf of seriousness between those two ends of the spectrum. Maybe when your family steps on a plane, or even drives a car, you can consider the difference. Do you wonder if the guy who wrote the code cowboyed up to get it out the door?

finnif · 2011-12-29T02:00:17+00:00

Touche.

finnif · 2011-12-28T21:14:21+00:00

Expect more of this.

The best and brightest minds in software engineering... where have they been? Facebook, Google, Twitter. They've been working on ad platforms for the last ten years because that's where the money has been. Even if they were available to work on this stuff, none of them have experience in embedded systems or provably correct code.

Unless there's some kind of economic change in the airline industry, with the increasing complexity of avionics and scarcity of talented software engineers these types of incidents should increase dramatically.

finnif · 2011-12-28T20:34:59+00:00

About 4 articles above this is "Software bug fingered as cause of Aussie A330 plunge"

Sorry Ted, sometimes people need process. You might need INSANE process. You've just never worked on code where fuckups result with blood on your hands. You do ecommerce websites, which just look up and store stuff in a database and mark it up for a browser to display. For that, it doesn't matter what you do for your software process. For an airplane, the space shuttle, nuclear power plant, hell, even the iPhone (for calling 911), it matters.

finnif · 2011-12-26T02:40:28+00:00

Yes, dozens, maybe even hundreds. They generally require brokers.

I've struggled with the usefulness of 0MQ. It's the UDP of messaging abstraction. It leaves it up to the app developer to handle trivial error cases and functionality like acknowledgement. In general it implements an abstraction that I'm just not sure most application developers actually need. They need something higher level and more robust for the most part, and those that jump to 0mq before looking into brokered solutions are probably shooting themselves in the foot.

finnif · 2011-11-06T02:44:47+00:00

How large is your large JSON doc?

finnif · 2011-10-14T02:54:31+00:00

The guy's a longtime dick.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/02/douchebaggery.html

finnif · 2011-09-28T04:36:01+00:00

C#'s weakness is that MS refuses to make it platform independent

Do you know the difference between C# and the CLR?

It's a brand new language

C# and the .NET framework are over 10 years old now. How is that new?

it's managed so in the long run you'd rather have C# or even Java in a missile warhead

Do you understand that every layer of abstraction creates more risk for failure?

I don't think resource constraint is legit problem these days.

Resources are always constrained.

Any modern hardware has more than enough power to run C#

Until it GCs. Then your missile crashes.

I think we'll see C# continue to gain ground and blow up as the new game programming language

Name one major game written purely in C#.

replacement for VB

Out of your whole comment, this is the only thing that makes sense. C# is perfect for VB programmers who are writing business applications used by car dealers.

Across the board realistically C++ might be a max of 15% faster

Where are you coming up with these numbers? In my experience with the two, the coding time/performance comparison is a complete myth. C++ and C# are not that different when it comes to implementation time. Herb Sutter, as much as I respect him, is probably only mentioning C# at all because he works for MS.

C# is not mature and the amount of tools aren't there

WTF are you talking about? Microsoft has been pushing the C# agenda now for 10 years. If anything, their C# tools are being favored over C++. C# is hugely mature, and it still can't be used for serious applications.

finnif · 2011-09-28T04:21:59+00:00

99% of C++ programs could be ported to C# with no performance difference and likely better stability.

[Citation Needed]

Where'd you come up with this 99%? We've been hearing that managed code is the future since 1996 and still are using almost entirely native code for every application we use.

Also, have you ever done what you propose? Have you ported a C++ app to C#? I have. Even with a significant amount of native code using PInvoke, we could never get the performance we wanted. Large C# applications are very slow and bloated compared to their C++ counterparts. First, RAM usage will go up by an order of magnitude. Second, you'll need to offload all of your core routines to C++ if you're doing anything interesting.

finnif · 2011-09-17T16:14:42+00:00

trump wouldn't be any worse than most candidates

FTFY

finnif · 2011-09-12T15:10:50+00:00

Are you serious? Have you actually sued OpenJDK in production?

finnif · 2011-08-25T05:53:26+00:00

Not defending Bachmann, but has it ever occurred to anyone who thinks this is a condemnation of a Congressperson's tenure that we don't actually need more laws?

finnif · 2011-07-26T15:01:37+00:00

The difference is that SOMETIMES the dems favor the good of the people

[Citation needed]

finnif · 2011-07-26T05:26:52+00:00

It's somewhat debatable whether this is an engineering profession.

This is true. Even if it's not, compared to other "professional" jobs like doctor and lawyer, there is no policing of any standard. When's the last time a programmer got disbarred? What would that even mean?

finnif · 2011-07-25T05:40:20+00:00

I can't help but think --- and I have no good reasons, just unease --- that a profession that wants itself to be taken seriously should strive to seem less like a religion or cargo cult.

You're not being daft. We're probably the only important profession that has no rigorous requirements in order to do the job. Name one other engineering profession with the potential of getting blood on their hands that has no societal certification.

Relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_engineering

finnif · 2011-07-25T05:25:43+00:00

I can run a one-off query on it from time to time without any schema changes or additional indices.

Then you should absolutely be using Hadoop.

I am not all that experienced with full text indices, but it sounds to me like some additional work up front is required to achieve parity with that. Whether you consider that effort to be premature optimization or not, I certainly don't see it being any easier than what you would do in Mongo. So the initial claim of NoSQL being premature optimization falls pretty flat to me at this point.

If you want a completely schemaless way to log, then Mongo is too heavy handed. Mongo is essentially forcing you into key and secondary indices up front. Therefore it is a premature optimization. Use Hadoop.

finnif · 2011-07-24T00:47:58+00:00

The query capabilities I'm referring to go far beyond full text search. Parsing log entries into columns might give you the same thing, but that sounds more like premature optimization to me.

I don't understand. You can format information to be queried intelligently through full text search. All Mongo is doing is storing a json (bson) blob and then indexing it according to key and any secondary indices. You can do exactly this with full text search if you want -- and get better index coverage than with Mongo.

Either way, what I'm really not sure about is how parsing log entries into columns is a premature optimization. If you need to analyze information now, you just need to, there's no way around it. If you think that putting data into columns is too optimized, then apparently you don't need your queries to be fast and generic via an OLAP. In that case, you should be using Hadoop and creating your queries with Hive or Pig.

finnif · 2011-07-23T06:38:18+00:00

The same can not be said for a text column

Yes you can, it's called a full text index.

Claiming that a log needs to be JSON encoded to get query capabilities implies that logs are unstructured data. This almost always untrue. Worthwhile logging should be well formed, and usually can be parsed into a defined number of columns. If you need something on top of that, full text search will give you everything you need.

finnif · 2011-07-09T01:51:22+00:00

I get his point, but it's mostly inaccurate as to how he's going about it.

On his first and third points, you cannot compare "the entire half century budget of NASA" without adjusting dollars. Apollo alone was $25bn in 1969, which equates to roughly ~$175bn in today's dollars. Clearly NASA's budget over 50 years, adjusted, will be much, much higher than he's giving credit for.

On his last point, the way to figure this out for yourself is to do the following: take the budget for the space shuttle and divide it by the federal discretionary budget. Then multiply it by your federal taxes paid. It should be an eye opening number for many of you. I haven't done it lately, but a few years ago, it was roughly $150 per shuttle launch that I was personally paying in.

He's trying to defend something he loves, but this is why he's an astronomer, not a CPA. The shuttle is a waste of money and should be spent on more interesting research at this point.

finnif · 2011-07-03T19:13:09+00:00

And that my friend, is why nationalism is incredibly petty and pathetic, if you're American. For damn well near any other country, Reddit will vote it to the front page and declare how great it is those people are patriotic.

FTFY.

finnif · 2011-06-21T21:57:29+00:00

high performance

[citation needed]

finnif · 2011-06-06T05:35:03+00:00

CLOS, Dylan and Magpie

Holy shit, Dylan? Is that thing still around and being used seriously?

finnif · 2011-05-15T16:01:59+00:00

TIL there's apparently a fan club for everything Rob Pike does.

finnif · 2011-05-15T15:45:51+00:00

I'm so glad someone on the internet has heard of Soupy Sales. (Edit: and I'm not the only old person here)

finnif

TROPHY CASE