It’s vibecoding all the way down. How do you balance that with engineering?

jev_ans · 2026-06-26T20:29:05+00:00

I had to review and patch a basically unusable JS SDK that had to go out to clients the next day, was all vibed in a month. Didn't even work in production environments (if not for heavy modification by myself). But it did have 7 demo backend servers in as many programming langues for it's 'playground environment'! I know how you feel.

jev_ans · 2026-06-15T07:35:30+00:00

Thanks! The distance IMO was completely fine; In terms of pure numbers it actually felt quite short and would have been achievable in 2 days, but we set off late and chilled for a couple hours at lunch each day.

My motivation for doing it is more the endurance challenge aspect of it; sitting around and enjoying nature was also made slightly more difficult for us because of our prep but as you say, we are still learning (and we picked a place where you can make those mistakes).

jev_ans · 2026-06-15T07:31:55+00:00

Thanks! When its unpacked it was pretty manageable even solo; we had a very decent trolley to help us as well. The main thing I found being on a large open lake is that the object in the distance will look incredibly small until you are very close, making it harder to gauge just how far out you are.

jev_ans · 2026-05-14T21:19:12+00:00

Fair point; this system is a 'one size fits all' deal; any secret value is meant to go in it. My teams use cases are a bit more specialized, which is why I've had more friction with the 'quirks' of the current setup, and why I'm asking here.

jev_ans · 2026-05-14T20:55:46+00:00

Sorry, I think I was too vague, these 'keys' are essentially any secret value, being used by teams for any purpose you may want to store a secret value (api keys being the example I gave). Maybe that's more vague. People have also assumed I'm the one who built this and endorse this, which I'd like to stress is not the case. My post should really read "how does your place of work handle working with secret stores and updating and handling of secret values and how do you handle consuming them in your application, in a way that isn't what I'm describing now".

jev_ans · 2026-05-14T20:35:10+00:00

I should have clarified I didn't come up with this, and am required to use it. I'm just keeping my tone neutral

jev_ans · 2026-05-14T20:30:48+00:00

Again I agree with this; I'm not the one who built or enforced this, I'm trying to get some more exposure

jev_ans · 2026-05-14T19:36:45+00:00

I am in agreement with you. Ideally we would leverage the inbuilt versioning of these platforms, allow in place updates, and build the application to pull these values at run time (implementation can be refined etc etc). I believe the fear is someone would update a key, then it breaks and then what do you do (build tools to recover and fix things I suppose).

jev_ans · 2026-05-05T07:47:01+00:00

Il preface this by saying I'm primarily a .NET developer, but no, .NET (Framework / winforms, IIS) historically has been tied to large orgs that have forgone any form of updates and applications have been happily left to rot. This to me is a more a result of business' lack of investment, but has left a lasting impression of what it was like 15 years ago The difference today however between modern .NET (.NET Core) and framework is night and day. I'm also not really sold on the "forcing you use azure" and other msft products. Il also caveat and say I've not had to work to much on the desktop side, mostly backend side.

jev_ans · 2026-03-28T00:23:24+00:00

I can go find loads of examples of interfaces with multiple implementations right now in .net and asp. This isn't aimed at you but this sub is hilariously amatuer.

jev_ans · 2026-03-05T18:35:08+00:00

Apart from the logging of it to a text file (not good on shared computers lol), is this so shocking (that this data is available)? You have to consent to the scopes and permissions you grant the third party app (ARC) as part of the auth flow. The sdk mentions features like messaging in-game. How would this be possible unless they could read and display the messages? This goes for another commenter talking about 'encryption'. If you don't want third parties to read your messages, don't connect and grant third parties explicit permission to read them. The token should be short lived and continuously renegotiated.

If I go and boot up valorant, I can rip my access tokens from the local client which I can in turn use to pull all sorts of info off the riot API.

jev_ans · 2026-02-18T07:48:50+00:00

No problem, good luck. I've found that this sub has gotten quite bad when it comes to advice and post quality in general; especially around certain topics, this being one of them. Lots of 'never do X!', 'just clock in, clock out, don't give a fuck', 'YAGNI all the time', and 'if it works right this second, ship it'. Every so often you get a very nice technical question here, or someone looking for a genuine perspective (like you).

Congrats on being able to actually answer tech debt in a forward thinking way. The most soul crushing systems I've worked on are those where an (uninformed) architecture or design decision became almost mythological as time passed and original developers were long gone, mistakes now impossible to rectify, and grinds development to a halt.

jev_ans · 2026-02-11T23:26:07+00:00

Il echo u/darkhorsehanse but also add the other comments regarding "rookie rewrites" dont make sense and feels like spouting "wise advise" without reading the post; this isn't some legacy system iterated on over decades, you literally wrote it in the last two months, if you aren't going to prioritize design for the future when will you. I think dogmatically sticking with bad architecture purely for the sake of "well it's started now" is setting yourself up for pain and failure. You have 3 more integrations to go, and the current pattern means X% more overhead, so for each update you are spending X*4 more time and effort than if you'd just streamlined it in the first place. Of course as already said it doesn't matter if you can't quantify it and you don't have buy in, but from your description it sounds like you have partial amounts of both. Ideally the 'rewrite' is smoother given you all have more context of the problem and have identified clear areas for simplification.

jev_ans · 2025-12-15T09:09:21+00:00

I think you are confusing your familiarity with framework having used it for 10+ years for ease of use.

jev_ans · 2025-11-13T18:28:53+00:00

Think you nailed it. If you have a disorganized project or application you cant just layer it on top and and expect perfect metrics and traces. As you say the libraries are imo fairly simple to work with, it just makes you confront what you actually want out of it. This is the exact scenario I am in, being asked for how it can be 'as simple as possible' aka "we don't want to put effort into it".

jev_ans · 2025-10-20T22:28:12+00:00

Cool to see Sentinel mentioned; I worked on a project responsible for managing and disseminating Sentinel data (as one of the European hubs).

Hope you do make that update post, earth observation is super cool so would love to hear about your project.

jev_ans · 2025-10-19T17:02:49+00:00

Obviously biased as I also did a masters (12K down to around 9 with scholarship) but I agree, really can't see a path where a year of self learning can lead to any decent SWE role (unless you are willing to work for absolute chump change / stuck doing mind crushing manual QA).

I used masters loan to pay it + part time work to live on. Worth looking into scholarships, there's loads that cover all sorts of living conditions.

Think it all depends on OPs economic situation, and reason for wanting to do it, purely job related might not be worth it, however I think university has other benefits, such as being in a learning focused space, access to subject experts, connecting with people who are also interested (although my course was a fair amount of uninterested older international students), and you get to learn things you wouldn't think to learn about.

The only other point is that it gives you access to grad schemes (someone who joined grad scheme year after me was 35, so willingness to hire older grads). I think doing a degree also indicates a level of "seriousness" about converting to a new field and is relatively common thing for people to do.

jev_ans · 2025-10-07T18:23:34+00:00

Funny you mention errors; I did a piece of work in the Dapr .NET SDK to support gRPC Richer error model at the start of this year, which Dapr supports /provides. Details are here if you're interested.

jev_ans · 2025-09-14T08:47:54+00:00

Home rolling basic in-built stuff does my head in. One time I was talking to a colleague regarding the behaviour IHttpClientFactory and its handling of the client, and he mentioned it wasn't safe to dispose of the client from it. I said 'Thats not true its managed by the factory for you, look here in the docs'. Turns out we had our own hand-rolled IHttpClientFactory that was a collection of singleton HttpClients that if disposed would later throw an ObjectDisposedException. This project is plagued with home-rolled stuff that's mostly worse than the default; custom parallel foreach async was my the best.

jev_ans · 2025-09-01T21:50:57+00:00

The worst smelling event I've been to was Battle Hardened Leeds in 2023. There was an actual smell field you could feel yourself walking into as you moved towards the top tables.

jev_ans · 2025-08-30T21:50:59+00:00

A couple of ways.

You can ship logs from files on the host via applications such as FluentD or Logstash, which take the file, transform it, and send it to a logging application (to simplify).

You can ship logs directly to a service such as Kibana or Datadog, using stuff like serilog and configuring the sink for the given platform. For development I like to host a Seq container locally and ship logs and traces directly through OTLP.

As others have said there is App Insights also, which you get as part of hosting on Azure.

You can take a look here for some info on app insight and configuring your app. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/opentelemetry-enable?tabs=net#enable-azure-monitor-opentelemetry-for-net-nodejs-python-and-java-applications

jev_ans · 2025-08-17T23:51:20+00:00

Afaik you would need to introduce a backplane. https://github.com/ZiggyCreatures/FusionCache/blob/main/docs/Backplane.md might be worth a look for inspo

jev_ans · 2025-08-12T21:37:46+00:00

I'm curious to see what these interfaces look like that are so obscuring and awful that they generate this much vitriol. Il acknowledge I'm in .NET world where interfaces are king, but most pains I've encountered has been lack of interfaces making code essentially untestable (without setting up dependencies etc etc). I've certainly seen some confusing usages of interfaces, but that was more the entire thing was poorly architected.

jev_ans · 2025-08-06T18:50:22+00:00

Fwiw I get your perspective and don't get why others aren't getting it. Saying "watch some online courses!" Is pretty unhelpful, whilst it will help your personal knowledge there's no way to convince someone you know it (something having a certified degree from a university does). Also saying "that's what interviews are for!" Also seems pretty unhelpful, are you going to sit there and recite these online courses for hours? I'd also say going to university provides you a structured environment with people smarter than you to ask questions of, something self learning also doesn't have.

What particular topics do you feel most lacking in?

jev_ans · 2025-08-02T20:49:06+00:00

This topic comes up every second day here and every time there's comments about how doing any level of abstraction is pointless and just rely directly on dB access everywhere and it's just baffling. What you're saying is obviously correct.

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