The Secret About Big Software Companies

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[@brandongregori995]

Shhhh.... they'll never let us build a new boat if they know it won't help...

[@isuperman1113n]

This one video just undid years of little white lies... dammit how will I convince them to use Golang now?

[@cat-le1hf]

@@isuperman1113n i will dislike this video so i can continue rewriting stuff in golang

[@Elefantoche]

Building new crappy boats is the way lots of programmers get promotions too.

[@flarebear5346]

I love boats though

[@adrianpurser]

Everyone knows you can't polish a turd. But you can roll it in glitter.

[@ktktktktktktkt]

You literally can. The Japanese have this thing called dorodango which is polishing a ball of dirt and the Mythbusters applied it to poop and it worked.

[@tomsmith6513]

You didn't like the old Mr Hankey, so you made a new Mr Hankey

[@AlexV6]

@@ktktktktktktkt Maybe MythBusters didn't try to smell or taste it. I'm pretty sure it was still a turd. 😆

[@XDarkGreyX]

​@@AlexV6 nicely dressed people can have bad teeth, piss-stained underwear and unwashed endholes. It's about the looks. A shiny turd ball may look nice

[@dimitardobrev3296]

😂

[@definitive_solutions]

lol this is both peak comedy but also like the most leveled take on the topic, and it's effortless delivery, I'm loving it

[@elcapitan6126]

lived experience. he's one of us. one of us. we don't suffer these things alone

[@ErazerPT]

Dear god, this hit so hard... Its probably why it's so much fun to work on small, very focused tools. It's hard for those to ever hit the "ungodly mess" ballpark. Unlike "anything sizeable", where it only seem to get worse and worse as it grows.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

It's just reality of large software. If you expect things to be nice... You are delusional

[@ErazerPT]

@@ThePrimeTimeagen “all hope abandon ye who enter here”. Been at it long enough not not have any delusions left. Its all the kludges you have to hammer in to get things to play nicely (or at all), that you really didn't need, but had to have because business wanted some feature or another, and it was either "burn the boat" or "duct tape and rubber bands". The former costs time/money so you usually end up with the later. And as you said, even if it's the former, it's only a short truce before the hostilities start all over again and you're back to the same muddy trench war... Thank god for "side projects" that remind you things can be simple and fun. Until WE become the source of feature creep and it all derails as usual 😂

[@QwertyOverload]

@@ThePrimeTimeagen Wise words

[@carjaune6793]

No lie. This is one of the best vids I’ve seen on KZbin since 4pm

[@andymoss4285]

The part when he started drawing the the steam rising from the shitty bit suddenly made me understand the Java logo

[@TimothyWhiteheadzm]

The issue I have noticed is that as the complexity / size of an application goes up, the effort to build/maintain it goes up exponentially. But we expected it to go up linearly. So we think that if we double the application size it will take double the effort when in reality it takes 4x the effort. The reason is simple, every time you add a new page/feature the new complexity is that new feature + every interaction that new feature can have with existing features.

[@thekwoka4707]

Which is a lot of motiviation for moving to systems that reduce that cost. Like yeah, jquery and php works...but it fucking sucks at still modest sites......

[@armornick]

"Everyone but me sucks at writing code!" In a side-note, I'm currently working on code I wrote 10 years ago and it is very eye-opening.

[@brod515]

eye-opening in what way? I don't think I have access to any code I wrote when I started.

[@leonezed]

​@@brod515 I imagine in the "wow, this code actually sucked" way

[@brod515]

@ although that's kinda obvious. a 10 year difference.

[@zb9458]

I've got code I wrote 5 years ago right out of college, and I look at it now, and in some ways I'm disgusted because it's so ugly, but in other ways I'm like wow, I used to just be able to get shit done instead of being so focused on doing everything The Right Way™

[@someonespotatohmm9513]

I often have the same but there is one exception. I had to implement a Q table and its update (basicaly pathfinding) in Matlab. Matlab is actualy fast, atleast faster then any c++ code I can write as long as you are manipulating matrices and don't use loops. So instead of doing the normal and readible thing and looping over the milions of entries in this 3d matrix you have to write everything as matrix selection, acces and manipulation opperations. After more then a week I got the runtime down to minutes instead of the almost a day it took originaly. I still know what each line does but wouldn't be able to tell you how it does that after getting rid of 3 or 4 loops that i needed originaly. It is both beutiful and horible how many opperations you can cram into a single line.

[@descendency]

What's my favorite boat? The next one. That's my favorite boat.

[@giorgos-4515]

this but with beer

[@Zythes]

The nicest boat is the one on the horizon

[@ScottHess]

Part of this is that we are always trying to measure velocity with no idea of how to measure distance, so instead we measure the appearance of velocity. That means we are drawn to flashy options even though in the long term we maybe need a boring option which can extend the period where we can keep making progress.

[@programmer1356]

VERY nicely put. No distance, no metric. Also no idea of what the dimensions are or how many of them there are

[@januslast2003]

Or, maximize velocity because that's a "metric" but keep extending the distance that needs to be covered. If required, that means going back to the starting point. We can do this because distance is not a "metric". The business just needs to be comforted by the high coding velocity. I hear Angular is back so may be we need to stop converting our old Angular to React, and just convert to the newest Angular.

[@_Huperniketes_]

If we learn to measure distance, we’ll have to face the uncomfortable truth that perhaps we’re not as smart or skilled as we thought and they’ll take away our toys. And worse, the suits will realize how wasteful we’ve all been and will kick us out of the playground.

[@ericm97]

“Life would be a tragedy if it weren’t a comedy” 😂😂😂

[@AlucardNoir]

You know, I take something completely different from what you just said, namely that there should be a maximum size for every project out there. Then there wouldn't be any more turds.

[@jesse9999999]

microservices - at the end of the day, just another boat

[@AlucardNoir]

@jesse9999999 ah, not a boat, a flotilla.

[@puppy0cam]

"but what if instead of one giant turd boat, we have tons of tiny little diarrhoea boats"

[@tomsmith6513]

@@jesse9999999 There are too many boat people in this society

[@tomsmith6513]

@@AlucardNoir People keep building more boats, but they never seem to leave

[@teimthepirate]

My last 10 years of dev encapsulated perfectly in 4 minutes

[@maciejciemborowicz]

Same thought :).

[@spuzzdawg]

This is possibly the best explanation of the Hegelian Dialectic I've ever heard.

[@the-first-joe]

This should be a part of an opening to every CS class or tutorial from now until the end of time; it's pure unobtanium.

[@dabrownone]

Any long term software project is like a house that you keep building over time, like the house in What Remains of Edith Finch. Eventually the foundation will buckle and everything will leak and rust and crumble away

[@AG7SM]

30+ years of this. Retired now. I got paid to chase that buzz you get from solving hard problems. And the better I got at finding that buzz, the more they paid me. But this is all true. There is no perfect code base that stays perfect.

[@Hopman42]

"Life would be a tragedy if it wasn't a comedy" This is one hell of a quote to just throw out ther

[@XDarkGreyX]

He likes that stuff

[@AbdulAziz-q7j1k]

At the end everything sucks

[@RamonChiNangWong078]

That's life for everyone else

[@johnyewtube2286]

Including your mom?

[@2639theboss]

​@@johnyewtube2286Sigh. Beat me to it.

[@meltygear5955]

@@johnyewtube2286 You're*

[@johnyewtube2286]

@ You are mom? 😂learn to English before correcting people.

[@m-ok-6379]

We keep rebuilding the same things without any real noticeable improvements especially in speed

[@Fe22234]

The demands from consumers has increased we went from simple html pages to streaming 4k video in the browser.

[@TheAcebyte]

This man is becoming more and more of an expert at drawing squares.

[@maciejciemborowicz]

There should be a vim plugin for this.

[@AnttiBrax]

It's not about the paradigm. Everything can be made well. But maintaining standards needed to make things well is expensive. You need competent people dedicated to the task enforcing the rules and educating junior devs and the incompetent seniors. That's why management doesn't take it seriously. It doesn't produce immediate revenue. Guess what. Maintaining the mess is also expensive.

[@hobbit125]

Definitely one of the best KZbin videos of the hour.

[@DingleFlop]

And we'll keep chasing that feeling.

[@rocstar3000]

1:40 the secret is big == bad. Thats why I have it small okay?

[@maciejciemborowicz]

Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses, or 1 horse-sized duck?

[@Manuelarte]

​@@maciejciemborowicz😂😂😂😂😂

[@gund_ua]

Man I swear my corner is the nicest of em all!

[@blaisecumming1122]

Thanks Michael, great video! I often think about "scaffolding" like around construction sites and mines... once there is too much scaffolding you pretty much have to move some every time you want to get to work in the jobsite, yuck!

[@NotAFanMan88]

Its no mistake this video is 4:20.

[@evilkittyofdoom195]

LOL...

[@SnWlf]

1:57 “Dude look at the boat I made!…” - that was an excellent Bill Burr impression 😅

[@steeb5884]

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."

[@Akshaylive]

Brudda has acheived enlightenment.

[@JD-mz1rl]

THANK YOU. I'VE BEEN SAYING THIS MY WHOLE FIFTEEN YEAR CAREER

[@gg1bbs]

this speaks deep truths I wasn't ready for

[@dadqqader]

For every 30 minutes long slop we get gold like this. Very good take.

[@ecommerceuk]

This is an incredible insight, and it's so true.

[@andreaselfving2787]

My boss (kinda sorta high up in the org), just reiterates this when I push for boat-burning - just face it, it's full of shit, but you can always polish your piece of it. The org won't change, nothing will, just focus on what you personally can change for yourself and your immediate colleagues.

[@hydrobolix3365]

We moved from PHP and jQuery because the features in EC6, the specifications JS is built upon, updated to a point where you could use JS for user interactivity without the need for jQuery and Ajax. Today the server is the private distributor, moving from Cloud, and the nextjs server actions are the start-up API actions

[@TrancorWD]

Once I hit the "why the heck..." level in jquery like 10-15 years ago, I went to straight js. The apis you need exists in the browser, why do we need bloat to handle single-page fragment sites, when access to history states is just there? Course, I am "Charles" here. Bootstrapping my sites together with a custom logger, cookie manager, image caching, etc. But they are just classes wrapping up browser apis, like every other framework in existence; plug'n'play es modules work better than a monolith for me!

[@carpediemcotidiem]

00:04 Web development trends fluctuate between server-side and client-side rendering. 00:28 Software evolution often leads to complexity and dissatisfaction. 01:08 Big software libraries often worsen as they scale. 01:45 Building software can feel overwhelming yet rewarding. 02:20 New software projects often repeat past mistakes despite initial promises of improvement. 02:48 Scaling software ideas leads to inevitable challenges. 03:20 Changing software components is challenging due to complex integrations. 03:53 Perception of software quality varies by individual perspective. Crafted by Merlin AI.

[@chillyvanilly6352]

01:57 Bill Burr (another gigner bill xD) would be so proud! xD

[@bluecup25]

You can tell this man coded in his life. Even if now he's an influencer bro

[@ShaggyKing]

3:11 not my boat imma make sure to swab that poop deck 😭

[@dev.roysalazar]

Of course whatever kind of project, software or not, when it becomes big enough it becomes very difficult to work with, but bad software architecture will determine how bad and how quickly you get to that point. Casey Muratori has very good takes on software architecture.

[@paladinsorcerer67]

According to Robert Martin, when right, effort (to build and maintain) is minimized, and functionality and flexibility is maximized. If effort required to maintain a system remains constant or shrinks with time, then the architecture is good. If the effort grows with time, the architecture is bad.

[@codingrules]

To be fair it is advantages to rethink your solutions to accomodate new complexity. Otherwise the work is gonna drag sooner than otherwise. However, you don't get around the fact that complexity will make it harder to create new work no matter how well it is controlled.

[@guyincognito1406]

Ahh this was cathartic.

[@ivanmaglica264]

And that's how you build Titanic. Also, it's usually the other way around, grass is always greener across the fence.

[@vvvvvvvvvwv]

Thanks a lot Charles

[@pif5023]

Best TED Talk so far

[@miroslavhoudek7085]

It's a nice theory but now please explain whatever has been going on in Microsoft Teams development in the last decade.

[@ToddMagnussonWasHere]

Other developers need to see this.

[@maccsguitar]

Eventually you just need to stick with the libraries you have and have to start thinking about architecture. Eventually you learn that you shouldn't fear work, and some things just need a little boilerplate to keep them simple in the grand scheme

[@GAD-mn5wn]

People are chasing purety and evergoing simplicity, but it simply cannot and will not exist, ever.

[@hardworkingslacker7233]

I think that at some point I will try to shift to a field of programming that allows me to build everything from scratch for each new project. That way, I can be productive and without having to live in a shitbarge :D

[@Aztari0]

programmers are the modern day sailors

[@gizmibob]

Wow, mind blowing. I now grow my sinking boot free of culpability. Thanks.

[@Dailyfunctionalprogramming]

It’s simple. It’s money to ship a product. A company does not want to spend dozens to hundreds of times more than it would make when engineering its product unless consumers would be willing to pay dozens to hundreds of times more.

[@outwithrealitytoo]

If Charles is still around you can ask him why he wrote his own logger,,, if you need it changed or swapped out he's your man. Continuity of staffing is the biggest factor in software quality. (not the only factor but the most significant).

[@andrew.derevo]

PrimePhilosophers - absolutely love it ❤

[@user123-u5q]

I have absolutely no idea of coding, nor the least interest whatsoever in coding. But this video is great, you're great man, thanks.

[@xwizardx007]

he just described my life

[@n00dle_king]

It took 2000 devs 10 years to build our new boat and no one got fired, but damn there’s no shot we ever make a new boat again.

[@JeffParker45]

Such a wonderful video! I will now dedicate my Life to building the boat building kits for people to build new and bigger boats 😁😅

[@Endrju219]

Charles had to do it, cause pino wasn’t around at that time. But even though we know about this, we’d still be happier if we could use something shiny. However, the reality is that nobody will be able to change the library, until Charles decides to do an after-hours hackathon.

[@Uppers101]

Currently having fun building a boat at work.

I knew you were the prime Alestorm lover Prime!

[@krottttt1]

Got it! Here's a more sarcastic tone while keeping your phrasing intact: Would be nice to see deepseek happen to all this client-side frontend mess.

[@jeslinmx22]

Manager: are we good to go? Dev: this boat sucks, we need to rebuild it again Manager: there’s no more time left, I’m not going to keep pushing back the release date, we need to ship eventually Dev: please, this time it’ll be perfect Manager: no, no more. I’m releasing it this time, Noah. Get on the boat.

[@zokontech]

Thank you, Prime this is so fucking cathartic.

[@DriftlessCryptoToo]

This is SO GOOD I have watched it 3 times!!!

[@PatrickStar-cv1pe]

Most people, including me, probably never have enough users that this becomes an issue. But if you have a client rendered page, many many clients do a bit of rendering, so they have minimal compute cost each. Given that you make your website performant enough. And your servers just send compacted and cached code and provide minimal endpoints for data, that must be server side. I think that is a good approach. With SSR your server gets a lot more compute load. The next big thing is full stack rust with wasm btw.

[@rns10]

Let me give you a story of my current job project. We have enterprise software whose front end we can customize to call the backend and get additional data. We built some functions on FE and some modules in backend, to call the service and get the data. Everything works perfectly in eyes of cllient/end user. But then recently I was trying to debug the logs, and found that we have around 7-8 api call to backend to get data. The system has a real logging system, it can only store 20 logs(enterprise product limitation) of the api calls that happens. And out of which 7 of them is our customized APIs. Result - We cant read the initial API hits because the system only shows the last 20 api calls that happens. You have to immediately close the browser tab to stop the further logging to see the first few API call hits. So now I have to propose to combine all those tiny 7 web calls into single web call, so we have room to read the standard api calls that happens in the system. System is never perfect. It evolves with you. If your boat has lots of trash, the reason could be that there was time constraint and you only thought of the instant gratification of completing the Jira task, instead of thinking about long term solution. Thats life.

[@LionKimbro]

This is the truth. I might just add one addition: People write software that fits their own brain. That’s why this last part happens like that. People write what fits their own brain.

[@DriftlessCryptoToo]

BEST CLIP EVER!!! 🎉🎉🎉

[@Gil-o1m]

The client side hype was a reaction to native apps on mobile....

[@lucasamadsen]

But who’s gonna carry them? Who’s gonna carry them son?

[@Henrik_Holst]

Prime, You're gonna need a bigger boat!

[@tohafi]

this hurts...we are in the middle of the boat burning at work...

[@daniiarabdraiymov4997]

@ThePrimeTime What's your opionion on Theo's T3 Stack? Can you make a video on that?

[@akuoko_konadu]

I mean because of this I can feed my family 😂 I'm actually in a middle of a whole portal rewrite 😂

[@ahcompsci]

That was fucking amazing and a metaphor for more in life than just coding

[@ripplesr5655]

OptimizedPrime ladies and gendlemen. 👏👏

[@Jasonlhy]

My boss term: keep you busy keep you safety

[@gigiduru125]

Except there is actually the optimal way to do it. Thick client suffers from the problem of state synchronization, which is impossible to solve efficiently because it's essentially the "two generals problem"

[@JD-mz1rl]

How about, "No"

[@kaylee42900]

Also we are terrible at assessing how much worse something would have been if we had stuck with the old way. We pine for what we love but aren't great at assessing that this was the least worst option. Also when it comes to something like React from Facebook/Meta you have to remember that especially in big companies it's not about delivering value for programmers or even users, it's about delivering dollars to the company. Sometimes those values intersect but if something was a worse way or slower way but delivered more dollars to Facebook then that feature would become the defacto way React operates.

[@npc-drew]

My dev mentality has evolved: first, build something that works, then aim for the best, and now, build good enough. Coding is less about perfection, more about compromise.

[@RossRyles]

This is true at small companies too. The difference is they have 20k lines of code... but only one file... and it's written in Perl... with no version control. You learn to accept that the boat might be full of 💩but at least it's not sinking.

[@Elefantoche]

The good programmers rarely think others solution is good enough, so they go and make their own, because they can, they have the passion and get enough time to accomplish it... .. and then, the cycle repeats...

[@user-kt1iz4vc3x]

you're already behind as tanstack router is already pushing back toward the client-side

[@slmille4]

Also if you make it simple, modular, and easy to maintain, then most of the team will get laid off since it can be maintained by a skeleton crew, while if you make it complicated, bloated, and hard to understand, then everyone keeps their jobs (Tom’s a genius)

[@Arcidi225]

I wonder how much of the problem it would be, if we were back in 50-70 where you had one job for your whole life. Would we create better software if we didn't have mentality "it works for now, and when it breaks its no longer my problem" because you know you will work elsewhere.

[@256k_]

i am so called out right now

[@flokkq7931]

As a non native speaker I have no clue what that title says

[@flokkq7931]

But i love it

[@Kiba114]

turd you mean?

[@hypergraphic]

Turd is 💩💩 and syndrome means a pattern of things.

[@SaHaRaSquad]

It says "Shiny Turd Syndrome"

[@Akroker1]

What is your native language?

[@irishcufta8]

Good Bill Burr impression 😅

[@klex3905]

Back in my day, optimization was the focus of the day, there wasn't room (literally) for all this nonsense.. There needs to be a focus back to that mentality. Just because you HAVE a billion terrabytes of memory, doesn't mean you have a clue how to manage it.

[@TheSimslash]

no the answer is way simpler its just that SEO matters in general, and its not google page ranking anymore In general it depends on the use case whether you want to put load on client or server

[@grim.reaper]

I think I finally found a syndrome that I can tell people I have 🤣🤣🤣

[@alexeiboukirev8357]

We never make the same mistakes. We always make new shiny glorious mistakes. Well, not exactly new. But they are not bit-for-bit match to our past mistakes. There.

[@younggiltak7719]

Stop cctv-ing my brain please 😊

[@abdulrahmanalsabagh3334]

this is one of the most relaxing videos I have ever seen 🤣 (I am not joking btw)

[@nuttButterAMK]

I very successfully dumped a "config generator" on my team and left the company. I'm proud of it, but my god, in some sense I feel bad for whoever is going to deal with it

[@monkemode8128]

When I was 19 I dumped a custom logger and powerpoint generation library on them with the only docs being code comments.

[@HeavenSevenWorld]

Well, AI can change the logger...

[@PierreThierryKPH]

To me, this sounds like an ode to clean/hexa/onion architecture and mob programming.