Continuing a discussion between programmers/developers....

Post Reply New Topic

In the thread Proofreading in the "Social Skills and Making Friends," two of us began talking about programming, so I decided to continue that conversation here in the "Computers, Math, Science, and Technology" section.

Here, Rhapsody wrote:

What kind of code-writing does developing intranets entail? Just a few very short scripts (one screenfull or less) per intranet, or anything more than that?

If it's anything larger than a screenfull, then you could probably benefit from learning some software engineering techniques, even if "software engineer" isn't your official job title.

Also, which language(s) do you use?

My partner and I develop and maintain a custom EMR (electronic medical records) system for a medical lab. We are far from being a big enough organization to have a hierarchy of distinct job titles (e.g. "developer" vs. "software engineer"), but we do maintain a large enough codebase that various software engineering techniques are absolutely necessary or it would be impossible to debug. The programming languages we use are mainly Java on the back end, Javascript on the front end.

Like I said, I'm really not working with code like you are. I'm not a software engineer.

I've worked with a bunch of them, and I know the basics, like the SDLC and sandbox vs production environments. Sometimes I'll follow these protocols. I definitely didn't in the examples I gave on the other thread because they were from very, very early in my career when I was transitioning from graphic designer/light web dev to full on development.

As for the intranets, it really depends on the company: what they need, what they want - which is sometimes what they need, and sometimes the whole freaking moon, and which intranet base they pick. I've built intranets in WordPress, Confluence and SharePoint but the bulk of the work I've done has been in SharePoint. WordPress and Confluence I use a mix of JavaScript, PHP, HTML and CSS, but SharePoint is a different beast often using C#, PowerShell, Power Fx, and DAX. None of them work the way you're thinking, with screens of code. I leverage knowledge of systems and best practices more than I code things, but I do occasionally code and more often build things using modules and snippets designed to build solutions within the systems. I build a lot of automated processes, like emails when things are updated, rolling dashboards (companies love dashboards) etc. I'm probably explaining this very badly, but yeah, I'm considered a developer because I build things but I'm definitely not writing software.

Thanks for explaining this. I guess there isn't much further to say here, but I hope you understand why I didn't want to ask you the needed clarifying questions in the original thread.

Webdev and Software Dev sometimes get close and even overlap. Web Pages tend to want things like CSS and JS. The complexity can grow fast. Writing code and need display and input and output. They can sometimes overlap with full stack development.

Yes, if you're doing anything that can't be handled by a cookie-cutter framework like WordPress, you need to write code, and sometimes lots of it.

I'm not even a developer and I get stuck coding from time to time. Most recently it's because my banks can't be bothered to properly name and date any of their financial statements. Or worse, use abbreviations of the month name rather than a nice simple number. And, to date, none of them that I've used put the date in Big Endian format as god intended.

So, I through together some code to read the PDFs for the statement date and then copy the file with the appropriate name to another folder so that later on, I know which statement I'm looking at. The work isn't quite done as there's some error checking and handling for different banks that I need to do, but it works well enough.

If I ever get around to starting a cult, it's probably going to be centered on that.

Which I guess makes me the sort of person that keeps actual developers up at night.

My biggest project was about 10,000 lines of code on a VAX computer. It was a mixture of VAX Basic and VAX Assembly Language. I used to love compiling it all -- it took more than an hour and so I would leave the office and go to a nearby 60's hamburger place to get a piece of pie.

Just out of curiosity about whether i could still spend days or weeks doing nothing but coding as much around the clock as possible, I spent my 65th birthday on a four day coding binge. (I mentioned it to the CFO of a power company and he gave me a big frown -- he thought that I said codeine instead of coding.)

I'm currently at an ISP and my current task is for a system of programs to run on the various servers that will let them take over tasks when another shuts down. They essentially monitor themselves and each other and whenever one starts to go down, it will broadcast messages to the others to take over some of its duties such as DNS and web hosting. Also, they will monitor each other so that if they see that one stops responding, those that are available will choose one to take the load.

For example, if the DNS servers are 198.51.100.100, 198.51.100.101,198.51.100.110, and 198.51.100.111 and the server for 198.51.100.111 goes off-line, then the one of the other servers will add that IP address and start answering DNS queries on the address. Later, when a server comes back on-line and is available, a computer handling DNS on two of the IP addresses can hand one off to the computer that just came on-line.

The intention is to have the network deal with as many of its own issues as possible in case nobody is available to deal with it or nobody notices that something went down.

Coding and codeine.

Two different drugs.

Reminds me of the book “soul of a new machine”

I go through phases where I want to code and when I just want to do seat-of-the-pants computing or admin. Eventually I will code. I have done some Javascript and front end development but mostly I do backend stuff and shell scripts. Doing a lot of SQL and PL/SQL lately. I can code in over a dozen different programing languages. Some I find more comfortable than others.