[psadri]

I feel like this could be adopted for your homegrown "whatever" framework (eg: UI framework, Auth framework, …)

Congratulations on getting hired to this team! You probably count yourself lucky, but don't. We had been trying to fill this role for the past 5 months and every candidate would run away as soon as we showed them our homegrown auth framework. But don't run yet please, do give it a try.

So, you are still here? It must be a bad job market out there. Looks like you found the documentation for the project. Let me save you the trouble, it has not be updated since 3 years ago (about the time John quit). No worries, there are lots of usage examples in the Perforce repo. Perforce is like Git but that's for another day.

So you managed to checkout the code. Before you type "make", let me remind you to install this particular version of Python and set up your LD paths. Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again.

If you hit the dreaded "std::vector<std::__cxx11::basic_string<char> > >'} is not derived from 'const char*'" error, ask Joe (if he is still around) to show you which header file you need to tweak. That's not checked in because it breaks the build on a legacy server we still have running for one of the customers.

… someone else please take over… :-)

[dreamcompiler]

> Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again.

This is why when I see some clever open source tool discussed on HN and I go to the repo and see it's written in Python I close the browser window and pretend I never saw it.

Yes I know there are ways to protect yourself when using Python in much the same way that lead-lined glove boxes protect you when working with plutonium, but I can never remember the proper CLI incantation to make the lead-lined glove box appear.

[zahlman]

These kinds of histrionics are really uncalled for. Virtual environments are easy to work with. https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/09/04/python-virtual-envi... is a solid tutorial.

[elzbardico]

Everybody else uses virtual environments and alternate installations of python instead of using and installing packages in the system python installation. It is not that hard.

[wtallis]

These days, if I'm feeling generous I'll spend a minute or two to see if I can get a promising Python tool to install with uv. If it's not going to easily submit to a `uv tool install`, then I move on and forget about it.

[ecshafer]

UV has gone a long way to fix that issue with python.

[pastage]

Any project written in a language with big user base java, C#, C++, perl, rust even fortran has this problem. The only thing that helps is experience with the language. I very seldom see code that survives ten years, even no deps things fail because your compiler interpreter changes.

It is just part of the job. Sure I am not a big fan of C# or PowerShell but a big part is just that I have no experience.

[jjcob]

Is Python still that bad? I remember the big problems were during the Python 2 -> Python 3 transition, but in the last few years I've managed to get away with a single Python install and haven't really had any compatibility issues.

I stick with Python.org packages for macOS, and the official Python packages on Ubuntu, and everything seems to work just fine.

[kunley]

Ehm.. surely there are ecosystems making Python brilliant shiny in comparison.

[hinkley]

This would be perfect if you replaced “Joe” as the bottom with John to illustrate that this document has been edited five times and not brought back to consistency. And also that only one articulate person ever understood it and he got scared off.

> 3 years ago (about the time John quit)

> ask John (if he is still around)

[psadri]

That’s funny. Yeah. I wrote this on the fly. It can use multiple passes to add layers of self reference / depth.

[BLKNSLVR]

Stop it!

... you'll need to refer to these pages on Confluence, but they haven't all yet migrated to the new Confluence documentation structure, which is here, so you'll need to search both. And then the really detailed documentation is in Sharepoint here, but when we update these documents we'll also need to convert them to PDF and publish them to our Customer-accessible ticketing system using this specific ticket number, which you'll need to remember because search on that system doesn't work very well.

[axus]

Also the Customer-accessible ticketing system is Microsoft Dynamics 365

[dreamcompiler]

...and keep in mind that our self-hosted Confluence instance is several years old and since someone finds a new Confluence vulnerability every three days the data you need may vector some malware to your machine so you probably should only look at the docs on a sandboxed VM. Atlassian has been bugging us to convert to cloud hosting for 5 years and management won't let us but that's another story.

[McGlockenshire]

There was a time when a previous employer looked like we were going to go down in flames -- 2008. I wrote such a love letter in the main include file (yay PHP) that told them how to figure out how the application worked and gave a credit blurb to all the previous devs and how they helped build the application.

We didn't go under quite yet and it was my extreme pleasure to allow two more devs to write their own blurbs and edit the letter to help future others. The company later went under and was acquired by a competitor, so I'm sure they've seen the letter in order to figure out how to extract data from the system. Effort not wasted.

[aitchnyu]

StackOverflow jobs no longer has Joel's checklist, one was a single script to bring up a dev environment in your system.

[ainiriand]

... If you want to have a reliable copy of the database do not rely on the one that sits in the repo, ask Steven for one of the latest backups that he made and that should be in his own cloud drive. Then you can proceed safely to run the migrations, just remember to skip the one labelled as 20259999-9 as this was made for a prod hotfix and is still necessary. Edit your migrations table to skip it. The migrations table will be created when you run 'status'.

[heresie-dabord]

> I feel like this could be adopted for your <organisation's management shenanigans>

Welcome to $org. Up to this point in the hiring process, you may have believed that we are a principled, well-structured meritocracy where all talent and hard work are appropriately awarded.

Well I find it necessary to inform you...