I think you should learn the foundations of JS before you use a JS library, but I see no value in teaching people JQuery before you teach them react.
3,769 karma · joined May 3, 2016
I see your approach in a lot of fresh graduates. They’ve learned things from the ground up, which means a good chunk of what they’ve learned is useless historic knowledge that doesn’t actually teach you a lot about how the modern eco-system of the web works.
That’s time they could have spent learning docker and authentication security. I mean, it’s often the one guy/girl who’s spent their free time setting up ADFS authentication in AWS for the fun of it, who gets the job.
But why wouldn’t you teach them that instead of teaching then legacy shit they’ll never use that also isn’t really that handy for understanding how things work now?
We’re supposed to stand on the shoulders of giants, and having struggled with apache or better yet the IIS, is just so utterly useless.
Apparently APIs are really hard for most companies.
But maybe I just sucked at vue.
An Apollo/yoga graphql setup with node and prismsa is just really, really productive.
There is also the advantage of sharing environment between front and backend, I mean, there are just so many hours, it’s hard to keep up with two major languages and their communities (two and a half if you’re using typescript).
Furthermore they are all easily explainable concepts that any CS student will be able to grasp once they reach their first programming language course.
I’d say most of the concepts are easy for non-CS students as well. Access modifiers, especially public and private aren’t hard concepts, are they? Yet they are insanely important to your basic understanding of what a function does. Private is like singing in the shower, you’re doing it for you. Public is like signing at a concert hall, there you’re signing for the audience.
Return values are values functions return, your can think of them as the result a calculator gives your when you ask it to add 2 and 2, here the return value is 4.
Types are typically the first thing you explain anyway, including when you teach python.
Maybe you could get people writing complicated functions faster in python, but why would you want to? The purpose of teaching programming isn’t to have people writing code as fast as possible, it’s to teach them to understand what the hell it is they are writing, so they’ll know why they do it.
Writing a basic hello world function you’ll learn about types, return values, references, imports and access modifiers, all in three lines of code.
Java is also excellent for building stuff like various linked lists to see how the lists and arrays we all take for granted actually work behind the scenes.
The confines of Java’s strictness is also a really great sandbox in which to teach best practices without students ever getting in danger, because java will tell them every time they do.
I know a lot of teachers really struggle to do it well, but going through public void X, word for word can be extremely useful in teaching. For one, it’s very easy to spot who knows what is happening and who is just copying stuff to make it work.
I think python is quite terrible for teaching beginners, but it’s certainly fun to write. These days, I think JS and Node is more fun than python but that’s mostly because it’s where a lot of the fun is happening, I certainly could do without all the {s and ;s.
One example is the case files I told you about. It's basic image recognition really, but it's millions of poorly scanned pages. 10 years ago, we would've gone through it by hand, and it would've taken 8-12 full time employees 3 months to do it.
Now we can have one PHD student do a 2-3 month training project that he/she uses for their research, and we have an algorithm that can go through the case files in 5 hours, provided we rent enough iron to do so. With AWS or Azure that's not a big problem, depending on size you can do it on-demand, but we had to call Microsoft and prepare 5000 server instances when we did it. That was some years ago by the way, so maybe it's on-demand now. Anyway, they went through the case files in 5 hours, and had a lower error margin than our employees would have had.
After those 5 hours, you shut everything down. There is really nothing comparable to that. You can certainly do that without moving other things to AWS or Azure, like I said, but it's often the financially solid decision.
And what's the problem with it exactly? Our own internal network has been breeched more than once, our Azure instances have never been hacked.
So not only is the data kept in Europe, it’s also kept on instances that are separated from the rest of AWS and Azure and we can physically visit our specific hardware in their data enters. Hardware which only runs our stuff.
This is one of the reasons we don’t use google, because they don’t offer this. I’d love to use firebase for instance, but not if I can’t be sure citizen data is absolutely safe.
We killed the local datacenter a decade ago when we started renting iron to house our own cloud. The majority of our systems still operate on VMs in that setup, but even that is more expensive than going full Azure/aws. We don’t, because a lot of our legacy systems wouldn’t run in the full cloud and if we need a SQL cluster on our own internal network anyway, then we might as well use it. Though, we’re nearing the point where a DB cluster in Azure will be considered our own network.
Then there’s the stuff we can’t do, like spin up 5000 servers on demand. Say we train some ML to find something specific missing from millions and documents. With Azure we can call Microsoft and plan to execute this, and they’ll give us exactly the resources we need for exactly how long we need it, and you just can’t beat that.
So it’s a cost-benefit thing. By going Azure and AWS, we get to spend more money on our primary function, which isn’t IT.
Azure is really far ahead on security compliance with EU regulation, perhaps mostly on the image side of things though. But that’s important too, because when I ask our data protection officer and our lawyers which way to go, they point to Azure.
Which is great and bad. I really, really like Microsoft and Azure is awesome for .Net. Only we’re doing less and less .Net, and more and more of the development pool I have to chose from in hiring situations live in AWS.
Our main cloud will continue to run in Azure, because that’s where our 365 platform is, it’s where our IT crew is certified and Microsoft has been a good partner for decades. But I do want the option for us to use smaller software houses that are AWS only to develop minor systems that we operate in AWS ourselves as well. I think this will help AWS in that regard.
My bad.
They use it on project management, sales management, key account management, four layers of testing setup that still lets bugs slip into production, and a whole lot of other useless stuff.
I mean, the budget is transparent, they spend less than 20% on actual development and makes less than 10% out as profits, so that’s 70% inefficiency, and they only won the contracts because all the big companies are like that.
You’re not wrong though, turning it political isn’t really great for building software. My point is just that a big company is almost as political as the public sector, and sometimes they are less adaptive because their political leadership and vision changes slower and has smaller range.
The equivalent system sbsys was also build by private sector developers you know, but here the political side handled the project management and codebase leadership, and apparently we’re just a lot better at that.
There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us.
You can make a lot of money in IT anywhere though. I manage 70 people, in a muniplacity that is well paid. I’ve been headhunted for much higher salaries throughout my career though, but I’ve always preferred public service.
The fact that I could be home at 15:00 on a Friday, with my kids picked up and the groceries done helped a lot in my younger years as well of course.
Granted, I think angrymob-media would be a much more fitting description than social-media, but it’s not like humanity wasn’t perfectly capable of making really shitty decisions long before the internet.
The system that does the same thing DUBU does today, and the next DUBU will, good enough is called sbsys.
It’s not a secret, the 120 million might be 128 million though, but it’s not completely unreasonable for what it’s meant to do, the politics involved and so on. It’s just hilarious that communal co-ownership of software did it for 2 million. I mean you could argue that it’s illustrating how silly enterprise software companies are in general, but it is what it is.
Where is it ethical to work?
I mean, I’ve been in public service for decades, so I know a thing or two about choosing idealism over money, but that’s not for everyone and I frankly don’t think Facebook is really that more evil than around 90% of the hundreds of software companies we deal with.
Like we recently ordered a system for abused children journals. A nationwide bidding landing in a 120 million danish or deal, for a piece of software that 30 municipalities build an equivalent of on their own for 2 million danish kr a few years back.
So some company is making 118 million because the world is rotten. That company is the most popular tech destination for newly educated CS grads in my country by the way.
IBM is literally the only major software with services company we have reservations about, and it’s only because they’ve been consistently terrible, unresponsive and completely inagile for two decades.
Look at redhat, we have a terrible relationship with IBM in the European public sector, and now that they’ve bought Redhat, we’re already planning for exits on our JBOSS portfolios in preparation for the inevitable fuck up.
That’s easy to do. It’s like changing the plumbing while the homeowners are at work. If you do it right, no users will notice.
Imagine doing that with the main OS your employees are using.
Maybe you could do it in the tech sector with little effort, but in a sector like mine it would pull the floor out from under thousands of workers who aren’t computer savvy.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but when windows or office breaks I have a phone line directly to Seattle and their incident management will stay with me on priority issues until they are fixed and it’s been like that for the past 25 years.
Stability is everything in enterprise, and everything organisational about Linux is chaos.
I only remember a handful of them, one in particular that is now a regular bookmark of mine (it’s https://www.valdemarsro.dk and in Danish so likely uninteresting to most), and the one thing that the ones I remember have in common is that they are their own things.
I don’t think there is anything beneficial to being a medium blog for this exact reason. I may read your article, I may even really like it, but it takes more than one article to get me to stick around, and because every medium article looks the same I can easily end up reading more than one without noticing it.
Having a unique domain helps as much as having a unique look.
It’s a little silly, but it’s where most of the UI innovation and technical skills lie at the moment, and we’re frankly getting to the point where there isn’t that much of an alternative.
Imagine being able to change the world.
All those employees will also bolster the community with purchases and what not.
In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet.
You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use an atm and then add funds to your bracelet.
It’s easily the best payment experience I’ve ever had at a festival.
Opting out was meant for people who aren’t capable of accessing a digital mailbox, but because of the reputation of public IT some people opt out for no reason other than they don’t want to be part of it.
That’s their right, sure, but those 1-3% of the population are now costing the government as much as the other 97% times four.
The typical person to opt out isn’t old by the way, seniors are among the most happy users, no, it’s middle aged men who think they know better than the system.
Ironically around 80% of them would like to cut the public funding. I guess we could start with all the money they are wasting by opting out.
There was a study in the 00s that looked at major IT system implementations, and I can’t remember the exact number, but it was around a 77% failure rate for business and around 85% for public sector systems.
Which frankly make a lot of sense. Because the public sector buys its systems from the same software companies that the private sector does.
I don’t necessarily think giving up is the best sollutuon though, I think it would be better if we demanded a higher priority on IT from our political leadership than we do now. I mean, we’re seeing some with the GDPR, but did we really have to rely on the EU to do the right thing?