Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier

theodp writes "Raw intellect ain't always all it's cracked up to be, advises Ted Dziuba in his introduction to Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier, so don't be too stubborn to learn the things that can save you from the headaches of over-engineering. Here's some sample how-to-avoid-over-complicating-things advice: 'If Linux can do it, you shouldn't. Don't use Hadoop MapReduce until you have a solid reason why xargs won't solve your problem. Don't implement your own lockservice when Linux's advisory file locking works just fine. Don't do image processing work with PIL unless you have proven that command-line ImageMagick won't do the job. Modern Linux distributions are capable of a lot, and most hard problems are already solved for you. You just need to know where to look.' Any cautionary tips you'd like to share from your own experience?"

Comments

Re:faggot

[IllusionalForce]

>>> cunt nigger
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    cunt nigger
              ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>>

Thank you for this great tip!

Re:HUH?????

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The entire article is awful.

newfangled stuff is not worth the risk

That's why you test new stuff, idiot.

If you have a process running and you want it to be restarted automatically if it crashes, use Upstart.

Hang on a minute, new stuff is not worth the risk, apparently. Perhaps when he said "Upstart" he meant "mon", or "monit", or one of the other well established process monitoring tools?

Parallelize When You Have To, Not When You Want To

I'd like to see this wonderkid take his non parallel code and parallelize it in five years time when he realises his non-parallel implementation doesn't scale.

Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.

Re:The hard way is more fun

[daveime]

Obviously the author had ImageMagick pre-installed on his Linux box, and has never had to actually install the fucker.

What a chore, pages and pages of mumbo-jumbo flying up the shell, then just when you think your done, it turns out it needs all kinds of extra libraries for certain filetypes (installed in VERY specific locations) to handle popular formats like JPG. Why in God's name the supposed "number one image processing solution for Linux" can't even handle JPG out of the box is beyond me.

It's not like you have to pay for the additional libraries, just download them from somewhere else, make some extra incantations, and sacrifice one extra chicken.

in

[The Clockwork Troll]

In B4 Persai