Top all-time · #17437
Adrian Smith
Personal blog · databasesandlife.com · on HN as adrianmsmithprogrammingcareer
Adrian Smith writes Databases & Life, a personal blog at databasesandlife.com about programming and career. Since 2011, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “On Transitioning from Software Developer to Architect”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- On Transitioning from Software Developer to Architect2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-03-12
What Hacker News says?
I think there’s a tendency in software for people to start out without understanding all the complexities they’re going to encounter. I think this is just human nature. When you start out doing RPC you think, I don’t want to bother with schemas, I don’t want to bother with hierarchical error codes, I don’t foresee the need to set the user’s password but not retrieve it. So you don’t want to bother with a technology…
Comment linking /the-cycle-of-programming-languages/
on “REST is the new SOAP”Submitted Why Subversion is better than Git as a story · 15 points
HN discussion> there should be an algorithm that everybody should agree on. An example may be: > - If there is downtime, it’s the top priority of everyone affected > - If there is an incident, it’s the top priority for an on-call agent > ... Very much agree about this. The trouble with "high priority" and "low priority" etc. is that different people perceive different things as having different urgency and importance. As long as…
Comment linking /priorities/
on “There Are No Bugs, Just TODOs”Submitted On Transitioning from Software Developer to Architect as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe !Edit text editor in RISC OS used this algorithm in the late 80s. https://www.databasesandlife.com/risc-os-edit-undo/ I must admit I found it a bit confusing at first. Took me quite a while to form a mental model of how it worked.
Comment linking /risc-os-edit-undo/
on “Resolving the great undo-redo quandary”Submitted Let’s rewrite this in Java as a story · 4 points
HN discussionA lot of people saying their blog helped them get jobs. I have a blog [1], with over 200 posts. I went for interviews at three companies in Austria in 2015, was surprised not one company mentioned my blog. Turned out the recruiter had removed the link from my CV. Presumably because it had my email address on it and they were worried the company would contact me directly. Great "value" the recruiter provided to the c…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?”Submitted Avoid aligning keys and values in source code unnecessarily as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRight, that's what I use, https://www.tarsnap.com/ has the option of allowing an access key to only be able to create a new backup but not read or alter or delete any existing backups. I blogged about my setup here: https://www.databasesandlife.com/write-only-backups/
Comment linking /write-only-backups/
on “QuickBooks Cloud Hosting Firm iNSYNQ Hit in Ransomware Attack”Submitted On Transitioning from Software Developer to Architect (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNot sure I agree with that. I ran the software for community with 6M users, and on 2003 hardware we had millions of files in one directory. That was with advfs on tru64 so things might be different with other file systems. But e.g. zfs can do this no problem as well. I just sort of assumed other FSs must have caught up in the intervening 10+ years but I haven't looked into their source code so an prepared to admit I…
Comment linking /flat-directories/
on “Tell HN: The site was offline. What changed?”Submitted Scrum stand-ups prevent you from doing your best work and they do that every day as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMy experience was the opposite. In code I wrote - I never needed to scan the directory to find "all users" (after all, if you have millions of users, this is going to take a while whatever directory structure you use) - Modern filesystems either use a tree or hash structure to identify files, meaning that lookup by name, and creating/deleting files, is quick, even if you have millions of files. - Given no performanc…
Comment linking /flat-directories/
on “Tell HN: The site was offline. What changed?”Submitted Avoid Vendor Lock-In When Sending Emails by Using SMTP as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI spent ages looking for project management solutions and settled upon http://www.liquidplanner.com/ which I'm very happy about. I blogged about why I made the choice, i.e. what it has that other tools doesn't, here: http://www.databasesandlife.com/liquid-planner/
Comment linking /liquid-planner/
on “67 Signals hasn't changed a thing”Submitted The cycle of programming languages as a story · 2 points
HN discussionEven physical CDs are not as easy to use as they used to be; this article https://www.databasesandlife.com/playing-a-cd-on-a-computer/ is from 2007: I bought a CD from a shop, a few months later tried to play it on my computer and the DRM had already somehow gone wrong in that short space of time. (At least CDs still work in CD players.)
Comment linking /playing-a-cd-on-a-computer/
on “DRM Broke Its Promise”Submitted Handle errors gracefully by offering idempotent APIs (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI believe that the layout of code is done by humans for humans. An auto code formatter destroys all of that meaning. I blogged about this more here: http://www.databasesandlife.com/do-not-use-automatic-code-re...
Comment linking /do-not-use-automatic-code-reformatting/
on “Ifs and &&s and Plan 9's Source Code”Submitted Which log levels to use when? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Additionally, 24.71% of these redirections contains [...] HTTP intermediate URLs. One problem I've found is that if you have a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS, then you don't notice an extra redirect from HTTPS to HTTP (e.g. redirect from HTTPS plain domain to HTTP www, which then in the next request get upgraded from HTTP www to HTTPS www). Combine that with the fact that it is surprisingly difficult to prevent the A…
Comment linking /jetty-redirect-keep-https/
on “Does “www.” Mean Better Transport Layer Security?”Submitted Minimal security is gained by using case-sensitive passwords as a story · 1 points
HN discussion"Over time, not only have I learned to appreciate languages with good type systems, I actually now prefer them for solving certain classes of problems." I think that dynamic typing seems easier at first, but after a while you see how static typing would catch mistakes you make. While one programmer gains the experience necessary to appreciate static typing, a new programmer starts programming and doesn't have that e…
Comment linking /the-cycle-of-programming-languages/
on “The comeback of static typing”Submitted Store users’ birth dates, not ages, in the database as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYes I've thought about this topic as well. All loggers in all languages have these different levels. But rarely is it defined which to use when! It's considered "obvious" but, unless it's actually defined, each programmer will find it obvious in a different way. Reading the logfile in production or using rules to only display logs beyond a certain severity won't be useful if every piece of code uses different levels…
Comment linking /which-log-levels-to-use-when/
on “A Manifesto For Error Reporting”Submitted Strong Passwords: Education not enforcement as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSo, here in Austria, I applied for a few software development and architecture jobs in 2015. Went for interviews at 3 different companies. Was sad not a single one had asked me about my blog as I'd written quite a few posts over the years. On the 3rd interview I asked to look at the CV that they'd been given by the recruiter. It turns out the recruiter had deleted both my blog and my GitHub link. Presumably the recr…
Comment linking /newest/
on “Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job”This actually happened to me; I blogged about it here. http://www.databasesandlife.com/windows-path-length-limit/
Comment linking /windows-path-length-limit/
on “Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters”"Is it just me or does anyone else have an incredibly difficult time with hibernate?" I absolutely won't use Hibernate for any new projects. I don't understand why anyone is using Hibernate. Here is a write-up of my experiences with it: http://www.databasesandlife.com/hibernate/
Comment linking /hibernate/
on “Play 2 vs. Grails 2 Smackdown”This is a terrible limit. Code generation is necessary for all sorts of things e.g. parsers. Having to hack in code to the code generation just to split methods to get around this limit is ridiculous. I had to literally abandon months of work on one project which was generating simulation code to Java. I was generating millions of lines of code, so splitting up the method would require a main method which would call…
Comment linking /java-method-64k-limit/
on “Method Size Limit in Java”