> It would be a mistake to insist that all of those spreadsheets should have started life as something else, just in case maintenance should someday become necessary.
The problem corporate IT/Dev folks face isn't that an idea started as a low-code tool, but rather that the low-code solution is often dumped on them with no budget or desire to improve it to be more reliable and maintainable.
At least until something fails... and usually in dramatic fashion that then wakes leadership up to the idea that maybe we should invest more into this critical business process. If the company didn't go under in the meantime.
Not the OP, but when I was doing CGI scripts Perl 5 wasn't released yet. And even when it was it took a long while for people and systems to migrate. Quite a bit of the early web apps were written in Perl 4 style.
> CGI scripts went out of fashion for several reasons that fall into the categories "too complex to maintain" or "there's this new thing called PHP...".
This is how I remember it also. Doing CGI "well" was significantly harder. And new ways of making dynamic web content was rapidly coming out.
There were no HTTP server libraries in any languages. All web servers were large codebases. Most of the web sites ran on Apache in multiuser environments. Configuring (and compiling) Apache correctly and securely took a bit of voodoo in those environments.
The security issues with CGI wasn't just injection attacks. How should admins setup safeguards when every user could write a binary/script that remote people could execute? By the time best practices evolved PHP was taking off. And PHP offered a little bit more of a sandbox.
And then... ColdFusion. Java Servlets. JSP. ASP. And many more ways of creating dynamic websites that were often easier, had better libraries tailored to webdev, and included better sandboxing.
Web servers started to become proxies to long running processes and stateful web apps became a thing. For better or worse. (for worse IMHO. :D)
CGI with Go or Rust could be pretty interesting and significantly easier than my first C-based CGI binaries. Mostly because of their extensive web-dev library options and dependency management tools.
The article describes disagreeable people as "selfish, combative, and manipulative." And "Does being disagreeable-that is, behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways-help people attain power?"
Which, to me, sounds very different from voicing concerns or identifying problems.
Wow! Lots of memories flooding back. I (Xamot) remember your nickname. E2 was definitely an interesting place, bringing together people from many walks of life. I meet many people, who influenced who I am today. And it is unlikely that I would have met such a range of people otherwise.
It really depends on what those experiences were at the same employer. I'm not the OP and not in the same boat. But I've been at the same employer for more than 30 years.
TL;DL: Feeding pets the animal byproducts of our own food production is not only a good symbiotic relationship, but also contains more of the nutrients the pets need (as opposed to grain-free or other specialty diets). But, the specifics for your pet will vary based on their own needs and allergies.
Wonderful comment. Mirrors a lot of what I've experienced directly or indirectly in the industry.
I'd add that mid-sized and up companies are usually not homogeneous. There are usually good and bad leaders, managers, and developers to be found within them. You can have a great experience in one part of a company and a horrible one in another part.
Another thing that I've found is that there is no "one true way" for a team to operate. I have found that what works best is to lean into a methodology that meets your business partners wants/needs and hire people that work well in that environment in that mode. Be it highly formalized and layer ITIL, super agile kanban+devops, or somewhere in between.
The problem corporate IT/Dev folks face isn't that an idea started as a low-code tool, but rather that the low-code solution is often dumped on them with no budget or desire to improve it to be more reliable and maintainable.
At least until something fails... and usually in dramatic fashion that then wakes leadership up to the idea that maybe we should invest more into this critical business process. If the company didn't go under in the meantime.