Hacker News Reader

Comment by cle | Hacker News Reader

For me, there are many cases where I copy-paste stuff I've written in the past b/c some tool is a pain-in-the-ass and I can't afford the mental context switch. I usually do understand what's happening under the hood, but it's still cognitively heavy to switch into that "mode" so I avoid it when possible.

Tools that fall into this category are usually ops-y things with enormous complexity but are not "core" to the problem I'm solving, like CI/CD, k8s, Docker, etc. For Make specifically, I usually just avoid it at this point b/c I find it hard to avoid the context switch.

It has nothing to do with miraculous incantations--I know the tradeoff I'm making. But it still runs the risk of turning into the Makefile Effect.

View on HN

It’s always hoped (but rarely shown to be true) that by making templates, teams will put thought into their K8s deployments etc. instead of just copy/pasting. Alas, no – even when the only things the devs have to do is add resource requests and limits, those are invariably copy/pasted. If the app gets OOMkilled, they bump up memory limit until it doesn’t. If it’s never OOMkilled, it’s probably never touched, even if it’s heavily over-provisioned (though that would only matter for the request, of course).

This has spawned a cottage industry of right-sizing tooling, which does what a dev team could and should have done to begin with: profiling their code to see resource requirements.

At this point, I feel like continuing to make things easier is detrimental. I certainly don’t think devs need to know how to administer K8s, but I do firmly believe one should know how to profile one’s code, and to make reasonable decisions based on that effort.

I do know how to profile my code, and I'll also continue to bias towards not doing it now. Even if it could mean more pain later.

I think part of the problem is that the pain it causes is quite visceral, but the opportunity cost is pretty abstract, so it's a lot easier to just focus on the pain and forget about what you're gaining.

I agree, and I think the key distinction is in understanding. In a cargo cult there's a lack of understanding, whereas I'll often copy and paste code/config I understand to get something done. Usually this is for something I don't do very often (configuring nginx, writing some slightly complicated shell script etc.) I could spend an hour reading docs and writing the thing from scratch but that's likely gonna be wasted time because there's a good chance Im not going to look at that thing again for a few years.

Pretty much this

And of course every one of those tools has to have their own special language/syntax that makes sense nowhere else (think of all the tools beyond make, like autotools, etc)

I don't care about make. I don't care learning about make beyond what's needed for my job

Sure, it's a great tool, but I literally have 10 other things that deserve more of my attention than having my makefile work as needed

So yeah I'll copy/paste and be done with it

Honestly is this not how it should be done? There's always going to be a more elegant approach for sure. But in general, we don't want developers to keep rewriting the same code again and again. Avoiding that is part of entire design paradigms. I'd like to talk to the dev who doesn't copy-paste and writes everything from scratch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com