The Big Programming Thread - Page 1018

On May 27 2020 10:47 travis wrote:
That's actually more complicated than I need. The game won't have any spatial aspects, so no movement. Just conversation, so just text output and maybe some input.

On May 07 2020 19:47 Manit0u wrote:
On another note, I'll have some fun in one side project now. Will be working with C code that was last touched in 1998.

On May 07 2020 03:27 Manit0u wrote:
Unfortunately this is not something that's easily achievable yourself. Only after spending years doing similar projects over and over, maintaining them, revisiting them and changing them do you really begin to easily recognize all those common patterns and such. Sure, there are books on enterprise patterns etc. but you can memorize them and still not see the patterns in the actual code (and there are other patterns than just coding ones). Another thing with experience and doing the same stuff over and over is that you can see the pitfalls in advance. You know that you need to do extra bit of coding to prevent code locks, running out of memory, problems with garbage collection in certain situations and you know that before the first line of code is written which saves you a lot of time down the line (when you have to fix code that's been in production for a while and only then the problems start to show up).

“The Nile is the longest river in Africa and the second in length of all the rivers of the globe. Although falling short of the length of the Mississippi-Missouri, the Nile is at the head of all rivers as regards the length of its basin, which extends through 35 degrees of latitude …”

At breakfast the next morning, “Tommy,” some one says, “do you know which is the longest river in Africa?” A shaking of the head. “But don’t you remember something that begins: The Nile is the …”

“The – Nile – is – the – longest – river – in – Africa – and – the – second -in – length – of – all – the – rivers – of – the – globe …” The words come rushing out. “Although – falling – short – of …”

“Well now, which is the longest river in Africa?”

The eyes are blank. “I don’t know.”

“But the Nile, Tommy.”

“The – Nile – is – the – longest – river – in – Africa – and – second …”

“Then which river is the longest, Tommy?”

Tommy burst into tears. “I don’t know,” he howls.)

That howl, the Director made it plain, discouraged the earliest investigators. The experiments were abandoned. No further attempt was made to teach children the length of the Nile in their sleep. Quite rightly. You can’t learn a science unless you know what it’s all about.

On May 31 2020 21:58 JimmyJRaynor wrote:

how is it going so far?

I love these types of situations in the software development industry... that is, going through ancient code.

On May 31 2020 21:58 JimmyJRaynor wrote:

how is it going so far?

I love these types of situations in the software development industry... that is, going through ancient code.

I've been doing the hermit-coder//"Bob Fitch" thing for several weeks now. A nursing org is replacing/overhauling a Contact Tracing Application made with CA-Clipper in the 1990s. The system's last big update occurred in 2005. It had major upgrades from 1995 to 2005. There is zero documentation. The last programmer who worked on the system is in his 60s. He experienced a major health catastrophe six months ago. I get what info I can from him. He charges the nursing org $200/hour so my time with him is very limited. There is one business analyst still working at the nursing organization that used this application. She has a vague recollection of how the system worked.

My best source of info : Turn on the Tracer and step through the code one line at a time.

Hermit Coder War Stories are the best...

Bob Fitch rescued the Starcraft 1 project by locking himself in a room for several weeks/months and making the SC1 engine.

I've been doing a similar thing for the last two months. I've been tasked with jamming together a project in a very unreasonably short timeline.

I've done the hermit coder thing several times in my career. It has built me some major street cred with project managers and CIOs. Some people can't handle it for whatever reason. I'm an only child and grew up only with my mom. As a child and teenager I had the whole house to myself a lot. So doing the hermit coder thing is right in my comfort zone.

I hear people whine, bitch, moan and complain about "crunch time". Personally, I love it. I'm having a blast.



i find this an interesting theme brought up in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". One can memorize and one can even parrot something and still never actually understand.



later in the same chapter...


https://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature/chapter/brave-new-world-chapter-two/

On June 10 2020 10:49 WarSame wrote:
I have a DB instance on AWS RDS which is giving a crazy amount of data in replies. I want to see what the requests and replies are to see why the amount of data is so high. I've found this pretty difficult to do.

Does anyone know of a way to monitor the incoming/outgoing HTTP requests/responses?

Currently I'm trying VPC Traffic Mirroring but it seems relatively involved. Is there a better/easier option?

On June 10 2020 10:49 WarSame wrote:
I have a DB instance on AWS RDS which is giving a crazy amount of data in replies. I want to see what the requests and replies are to see why the amount of data is so high. I've found this pretty difficult to do.

Does anyone know of a way to monitor the incoming/outgoing HTTP requests/responses?

Currently I'm trying VPC Traffic Mirroring but it seems relatively involved. Is there a better/easier option?

On June 06 2020 12:07 Chocolate wrote:
The biggest issue with patterns is as you said, thinking that more applied patterns to code = better code because patterns are in books about writing software. Patterns when misapplied can also make things needlessly brittle or verbose and hard to understand. Even inheritance can be an antipattern.

On June 10 2020 15:26 Acrofales wrote:

I'm not all that familiar with all the AWS services, but there's cloudwatch that you can use to monitor most of them. There's also the log files themselves. And imho your best option is to find one of the clients that is causing the data, and look at what they're doing. Imho looking at what the server is doing or what the client is doing is almost always easier than trying to figure it out from packages on the network. Unless it's actually a network issue.

On June 11 2020 12:23 WarSame wrote:
The issue is we were interested in which queries were causing such long replies, so just checking the queries wouldn't work(or would, but you'd have to inspect and reason about each individually). I've done traffic mirroring and put the PCAP into Wireshark. I then analyzed the traffic and found that we had a few reasons for so much traffic.

1. Tons of queries per conversation - ~75 queries to display one page to user. This is not a SPA and is stateless so the whole state must be reloaded every time
2. Queries with extra fields - a number of queries are using select * for tables with ~90 fields. Each field is ~100 bytes, leading to 10 KB replies. When you have 75 replies that's quite a lot.

The solutions I've proposed:

1. reduce the number of queries used, use a SPA or something else to reduce it. Long term strategy.
2. don't select *, select the fields you need

This should help reduce the traffic we saw from the DB.

I was also asked to investigate the latency to the DB. I noticed that the conversation took 0.3s for a particular example.

A large part of this was TCP/IP wait/response times. Previously the DB and all servers were on the same machine. They are now on different machines but that requires TCP/IP. Each query runs in serial, so the TCP/IP overhead is added up 75 times.

I have suggested to run these queries in parallel if possible to only suffer the TCP/IP overhead added to the longest query.

Feedback welcome.

On June 15 2020 01:26 WarSame wrote:
Yeah, I think for them the real answer is to pivot towards more an SPA approach, because that will naturally split up and group their queries, preventing the serial issue. The asterisk issue I think they're willing to spend a significant amount of a sprint or 2 towards which should be all they need.

You need to keep in mind that they are a company with a small team, not just one team of a larger company. They have 5 people, of which only 2 are heavily technical. Your team, I'd imagine is 7/7 tech people, or maybe with one solution owner.