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Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

Comments
  • 5
    The bloat is everywhere. Nobody seems to know and even to care how shit underneath actually works. That and hype driven development plus agile on top are going to create maintenance issues left and right.

    BTW, the "devrant" tag is only for stuff related to this platform itself. "Developer rants" are just "rant" because there's no non-devs ranting here.
  • 0
    @Fast-Nop It puts in the devrant tag on its own. Bug maybe.

    Ah I see, it's a UI issue. The thing is I want to put it as a rant and that's the closest thing.

    Are you telling me there's no rant option on devrant? It's on the top, my vision blocks that out as something else. It has the wrong size.
  • 0
    @RANTSMCPANTS Don't you have the option "rant/story"? In the web interface, it's the huge red option at the top, which is larger because most things are "rant/story". Except for the shitty memes of course.
  • 4
    @Fast-Nop It's such a huge button I just filter it out. I don't see it unless I consciously try. It's like a blind spot.

    No way is that a proper button. I think I understand though what they were thinking. It's huge so that people with touch screens can just bang their head on it. It's so you can hit it with your forehead.

    Also in modern UI design the big thing is nearly always the wrong one. for example, NO AMAZON I DON'T WANT PRIME OR MONTHLY PURCHASES, or NO SOURCE FORGE I DON'T WANT TO DOWNLOAD MALWARE.
  • 5
    I do like me a bloated rant.
    The industry is bloated because nobody writes code anymore, it's all
    "oh this library that 1mill+ lines of code has a single function that does what I need right now"

    Multiplied by every function the code base needs multiplied by a massive import base. You end up I'm with 99% of the code base being outsourced although some dev is keeping that seat warm in an office being paid not to actually do any work.

    @RANTSMCPANTS 🤔what are you using to access devRant?
    Mobile App, web, some other client?
  • 1
    @C0D4 Desktop. It's the way my eye works when getting used to stuff to normally filter things out to only see relevant stuff. The button just doesn't register in my visual cortex when on automatic.
  • 5
    Hey I guess this is a devrant rant after all.
  • 1
    I find the three star programmer test works as well today as it did 25 years ago, and applies equally well to framework and infrastructure abstractions.
  • 0
    @RANTSMCPANTS
    Well - yes. if it was all so simple, most of us will lose our jobs....

    Shit gets complicated for no reason. It is a simple chaos theory driven eco-system.
  • 0
    @RANTSMCPANTS Same happened to me. Took me like 3 weeks to "see" "rant" button. Too big
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