That’s decades of legacy for you…

I bet each step/arrow/decision had a good reason at some point, but most of them probably back when computers lived in caves and hunted their tapes using spears and rocks.

I feel like we’re slowly reaching a point where the complexity is collapsing in on itself - just look at the absolute chaos a modern web app is.

Prudes…

Java’s Duke just stands there, fully nude and is giving NullPointerException fucks.

Or requires a timestamp with zone offset, but ignores the zone offset, so you have to send the timestamp itself with a zone offset of zero relative to the systems timezone, but can’t just omit the zone offset, because it’s required.

Again, did you actually read the comments?

Is SQL an API contract using JSON? I hardly think so.

Java does not distinguish between null and non-existence within an API contract. Neither does Python. JS is the weird one here for having two different identifiers.

Why are you so hellbent on proving something universal that doesn’t apply for the case specified above? Seriously, you’re the “well, ackshually” meme in person. You are unable or unwilling to distinguish between abstract and concrete. And that makes you pretty bad engineers.

Did you read the comments above?

You can’t just ignore context and proclaim some universal truth, which just happens to be your opinion.

Nope.

If there’s a clear definition that there can be something, implicit and explicit omission are equivalent. And that’s exactly the case we’re talking about here.

I find it really weird that something as simple as the basic functionality of nextcloud seemingly can’t be implemented in a stable and lightweight manner.

Nextcloud always seems one update away from self destruction and it prepares for that by hoarding all the resources it can get. It never feels fast or responsive. I just want a way to share files between my machines.

There are other solutions, I know, but they’re all terrible in their own way.

That’s exactly not the thing, because nobody broke the contract, they simply interpret it differently in details.

Having a null reference is perfectly valid json, as long as it’s not explicitly prohibited. Null just says “nothing in here” and that’s exactly what an omission also communicates.

The difference is just whether you treat implicit and explicit non-existence differently. And neither interpretation is wrong per contract.

It can, but especially during serialization Java sometimes adds null references to null values.

That’s usually a mistake by the API designer and/or Java dev, but happens pretty often.

Well, yes, but the underlying issues still persist, so it’s not exactly a sustainable strategy.

I have to say, I’m getting more and more frustrated by the bad code I have to write due to bad business circumstances.

I want clean, readable code with proper documentation and at least a bit of internal consistency and not the shoehorned mess of hacks, todos and weird corner cases.

They re-invent everything for no reason. Every mundane device has been “re-invented” using big data, blockchain, VR, now AI and in a few years probably quantum-something.

The entire tech world fundamentally ran out of ideas. The usual pipeline is basic research > applied research > products, but since money only gets thrown at products, there’s nothing left to do research. So the tech bros have to re-iterate on the same concepts again and again.

Summary: nothing of value

You forgot quantum! We’re developing super duper plants that suck the carbon out of the atmosphere harder than a crack whore and make everything great for everyone (with money)!!!

It’s because they think it’s what you’re doing for a large project. Simple as that. There’s no future demand, the client doesn’t care, and I’m not right because they said so.

I still have to find a name for this disease, but it’s somewhat like “you’re neither Google nor Netflix”.

Everything has to be Scalable™ even if a raspberry pi could serve 200 times your highest load.

I’m currently involved with a “micro service system”, that has very clear, legal requirements, so we know exactly, how much load to expect. At most, a few thousand users, never more than 100 working at the same time on very simple business objects. Complex business logic, but technically almost trivial. But we have to use a super distributed architecture for scalability…

Have you considered something like tailscale?

Not really, it’s really largely a technical discussion, but we have a distributed monolith (the architect calls it micro service…) so each change of an interface will percolate through the entire system.

The beauty of titles like this is that they’re absolutely meaningless.

You can’t compare them between companies, sometimes even departments, you can’t compare them between different industries, and you can’t compare them between countries.

I’m a senior, and my job is currently to sit in meetings most of the day to convince BAs, architects and other team’s leads not to make stupid decisions. The rest of my time I’m communicating the results back to my colleagues and writing escalation mails, because Steve again tried to re-introduce his god awful ideas that we shot down five times before and I’m hereby voicing my concerns in a business-like tone, but actually would want to exterminate him and his entire offspring.

My old project, however, was completely different and I actually spent 70% of my time actually writing code and 20% code-related meetings.

Spring annotations in general. There’s a completely hidden bean context where every annotation seems to throw interceptors, filters, or some reflection crap into. Every stacktrace is 200 lines of garbage, every app somehow needs 500mb for just existing and if you add something with a very narrow scope, that suddenly causes something completely unrelated to stop working.

Realistically, DI and all the Spring crap does not add anything but complexity.