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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, me too, but systems grew over time and grew and grew and we were using HTTP headers for all sorts of stuff. This optimization makes the situation better, but the solution (which is underway) is to use a different mechanism for IPC and get rid of the use of HTTP headers completely.

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For anyone not in the loop, the above poster (JGC) is Cloudflare's CTO himself :)

I’m certainly familiar with systems growing over time and outgrowing their original schema.

Is this the same phenomenon that resulted in Cloudflare Tunnels apparently being domain names? Or why domains that are proxied by Cloudflare show up as “CNAME” in the DNS panel? (The latter one seems extra strange — wasn’t the reverse proxy service the very first service that Cloudflare offered? There must be some history here.)

All new products are full of scaffolding that has to be removed when robustness becomes a higher priority than existence. Where we fail is not calling it that. Instead we just call some code “good” while our thicker skinned coworkers call the rest “fine”. It’s not fine. I don’t want to be working overtime the week of thanksgiving because you can’t think past the horizon.

There is a very fine line between "good enough" and "not good enough" in any product beyond a certain complexity. Finding the pieces that cross that line can be hard and improving "good enough" parts is (sadly) mostly a waste of time in commercial settings.

You have to backdate starting a project so it happens before things stop being good enough. And take into account bad estimates and the five other deadlines between then and now.

Often it’s better to clean as you go. If you have the time and the inclination, shore up one of the least good enough things.

It’s not unheard of to open up new feature sets via refactoring. Something that previously would have taken an “impossible” amount of time now becomes profitable, not just possible.

I miss working at a place where that was encouraged. Now if I do that the testers complain that it’s not in scope for the ticket and to split the changes into another ticket with a separate test plan. The rot thus continues.

I think this is about when I discovered zone defense for performance optimization. QA doesn’t want to chase your code changes halfway across the codebase, and that’s fair. At some point it starts looking like you’re changing things just to change them, even if it ends up being a few percent better.

But if you limit yourself to one part of the interaction, they don’t get as mad. A dozen changes in the signup system piss them off less than five changes across the app.

This is why some bugs never get fixed (that is if you define a bug to include inefficient code and not just code that breaks something).

And when that happy day dawns, slightly sadly, this nice optimisation will evaporate!

Maybe the real treasure was the optimizations we made and discarded along the way.

Indeed. I am very happy with some of the tricks that I developed (speeding up, and indeed allowing, Solaris C++ linking by prefiltering on MD5 hashes of canonicalised .o files -> nm, anyone?) even though they were lost without trace (yep, Lehman Brothers, where are my Imakefiles now?)...

They're probably as critical as ever at Barclays :)

I really hope not, given that that very old Solaris compiler should have been laid to rest many many years ago. Yes, some of my stuff had kinda made it into BarCap (even onto my desktop dev machine!) when I turned up there later, and even some at Nomura when I rocked up there again IIRC!

I recall working at a broker/dealer on Broadway where a curious sysadmin noticed a power cord that underneath an internal wall that fenced off "dead space." Said space turned out to contain a "forgotten" minicomputer living just outside a machine room.

I recall returning to a bank and discovering that router and load balancer admin passwords hadn't changed in seven years..

My likely overly cynical concern here is that this suggests trie-hard will soon end up abandoned, as you're making it sound like it is a stop-gap solution for you.

You chiming in on this post makes me slightly bitter at having gone with CloudFront (I have everything on AWS so it seemed the obvious choice) instead of Cloudflare.

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