Is ST Cube IDE a piece of buggy crap?

[paulca]

And the other point is that yes, most software projects are made overly complex for no reason other than justifying software positions.

Where do you get this from?

In what world will a customer pay $1500 a day for a "software position" they don't need?

Please tell me and I'll quickly inform sales.

What I will say is.  When scaling up, its very hard to mantain efficiency.  However, as mentioned in my other post, sometimes you really don't have a choice and the hard way is the only way.

Consider the "Eclipse team working" ideas to Peter-h above.  It should be realised that is only needed when you have more than one dev.  The more devs you have the more efficiency will be gained from centralised, controlled processes.

However, by the time you finish out that full stack of tooling you will end up needed several people just to support it and look after it.

If you don't do that, you end up losing your efficiencies in the dev teams because they start spending all their time fixing and supporting their own tooling.  You can typically employe a platform support person for 60% the rate of a software engineer.  So it makes business sense to not burden devs with "admin" and "boiler plate".

[paulca]

I did consider a sideways move into "Embedded" software.

Did some research and ran away FAST.

If how much you guys get paid has any reflection on how much or how hard the work you do is, your job is easy.

It's either easy or they can find a dozen of you for each post.

A UK company wanted to offer me £30k starting for a "Principle Engineer".  They can honestly fuck right off with that.  Double it and I'll maybe think about it.  I was earning 30k as a junior is 2009!

The best I could find for a similar level was £50k.  However they wanted routine international travel between the EU, UK and US as part of that role, with absolutely rubbish enumeration for same travel.  Still retro grades my salary about  6 years.

Maybe y'all should take a step up for more pay?  I believe in the US the "average" software engineer salary is $100k.

[peter-h]

"Principle Engineer"

Principal Engineer is the correct spelling, so you were talking to an uneducated moron

Embedded full-time hw/sw does not pay as much as server-side coding. I "run" one server, done in Ruby on Rails when that was big fashion, and the rates are £1500/day, which translates to a Maserati MC20 Convertible every year and still leaving you with over 100k to spend on the women you will get Fortunately the code was done competently and despite 13 years of hacking attempts, nobody appears to have succeeded. But most server coders hate their job by the time they get to about 40, because of the constant flow of "new paradigms", so they get little opportunity to use their experience to solve stuff. Embedded is much more satisfying.

For any new server work I specify to use PHP. About 1/3 of the cost.

[paulca]

For any new server work I specify to use PHP. About 1/3 of the cost.

There is a reason for that.

As a test, post anything negative about PHP in a PHP community and you will find them terribly defensive.

This is a sign.

Do the same in a C forum or a Java forum and you will get a much more mature response.

PHP = "Personal home page", then became "Personal Homepage Pre-processor", then they tried for the cool recursive, "PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor".

You get what you pay for   [tm]

In short it's a pig with perfume, makeup and a suit slapped on it to justify "script kiddies" calling them selves developers.

For every short coming of the language there are 6 different "surface layer" and "syntactic sugar" band-aids.  It's OOP paradigm is about as solid as a french fry left out in the rain a week.  It's all just pointer parsing smoke and mirrors.

/rant.

The bottom line advice, profressionally, rants aside is this.

PHP is brilliant for RAD (Rapid application development).  PHP is also known, industry wide, for being unmaintainable.  For every penny you save in the initial dev costs, you will pay back twice or more in maintenance costs.

[peter-h]

That is true only if it is written by an incompetent programmer. As with any other language, you can write it well, or badly.

[paulca]

That is true only if it is written by an incompetent programmer. As with any other language, you can write it well, or badly.

Again.  Programmer singular.  You can do whatever the fuck you like.

When you have 2 it all changes.  I know you have already struggled with this Peter.  Try 5, try 10.

[peter-h]

Are you having a bad day?

[Nominal Animal]

I've written security-sensitive web backends in PHP and Python (and even in plain C back around the turn of the century, back when we had to work around Internet Exploder not handling connection closure/keepalive sanely, with various bugs in browsers' MIME implementations, and so on), for servers known to be basically constantly under attack.  I consider it doable (reliable, maintainable) even in PHP, if and only if I have full and exact control of the codebase.

Working on PHP or Python code, in a security-sensitive context, with someone else who has a different idea about security?  Hell no.  I can show how to maintain the codebase, by explaining the security model and how and why it works and what would break it, but that's just replacing me with someone who does the work like I would, and understands the model like I would.

That is also why I much prefer a hierarchical access controls based on filesystem access model: it allows delegating less sensitive parts to other developers, without opening up gaping security holes.  Pity current webhotels cannot support such, because they're hardwired to the "one machine user and group, one site" model.

[paulca]

That is also why I much prefer a hierarchical access controls based on filesystem access model: it allows delegating less sensitive parts to other developers, without opening up gaping security holes.  Pity current webhotels cannot support such, because they're hardwired to the "one machine user and group, one site" model.

A depressing amount of very useful tooling and infra was denied to us in banks.

They would instead launch multi-million pound internal projects to write their own.

Why?

The out of the box solutions were too useful.  Without at the same time having the granularity of access control the bank simple required.  When it comes to security vs. anything else, security always wins out.

So there were a dozen or two front ends to the platforms which were totally blocked/banned because their user authorisation model basically had "Pleb" or "God".

[peter-h]

I've just wasted 1.5hrs of my life today on the phone to a bank, sorting out a blocked account, blocked for a totally stupid reason related to an account at another bank in the group, so maybe you should have taken that embedded job instead

[paulca]

I've just wasted 1.5hrs of my life today on the phone to a bank, sorting out a blocked account, blocked for a totally stupid reason related to an account at another bank in the group, so maybe you should have taken that embedded job instead

KYC - Know your client automated red flagging based on proximity matching with other accounts.

You probably triggered some kind of "Are these the same person" anti-smurfing triggers.

EDIT I had a similar issue with a credit card.

I used it in the airport in Turkey.  Got home, used it in the shop next door.

Got a text message, then an email, then a phone call that my card was now cancelled and a new card would be issued.

Why?  Because the transactions from Turkey were delayed and applied 1 minute AFTER my transactions in person in Northern Ireland.  The system immediately flagged that I can't possible use the card "in person", "retail" in two counties 2000 miles apart inside of a few minutes.  One of them, most likely turkey was fraud.

[peter-h]

I did tell you that you should have got that embedded job, and then the rest of us would not have to deal with this banking idiocy

[paulca]

I did tell you that you should have got that embedded job, and then the rest of us would not have to deal with this banking idiocy

If we were to swap roles across the board in a sci-fi scenario....

I can tell you that embedded UIs will improve beyond VHS programmers for a start.