Scubabear68

Yep. Things like architectural review boards, RFC processes, corporate-wide approvals, etc are more about politics than anything else.

Often - not always, but often - the people seeking to sit on these committees are the least likely to be able to actually build software. It is a function of these kinds of boards that will invariably draw those who aren’t so great at coding or architecture.

A bit like being a film critic or book reviewer.

But did it make any difference? Are there metrics showing this was the right path?

The reason I ask is that this process seems to be couched in terms of politics and psychology, and not about organizational value.

This does not feel surprising to me. I think you mentally lock into the age where you really bloomed into your adult self. For many, that is their early 20s. For me, it is around 30 (I am in my 50s).

And then that perceived age very slowly drifts up, but still with considerable lag to “real” age.

There are vast amounts of Go code available in the wild to study. Open source is a thing.

If the Go team wants to see what features are used, go audit open source Go code.

Since Go is also a Google thing, they could likely audit the presumably large sums of Google Go.

Yes, you will miss unknowable amounts of code this way. Who cares?

Thanks!

I haven’t gotten through the whole article yet, and haven’t encountered Elixir before, but I really like the popes ideas. I am going to dig into that a little more. Are there other languages that have similar constructs (outside of shells!)?

This is well said and exactly right. Technical debt is normal, and you will find a reasonable amount even in very successful products. It needs to be evaluated against your total business context and priorities. Ideally you want this to be part of your process.

I have seen the result of projects where the team was overly obsessed with tech debt. The code may look nice, but there is not a lot of it, and the products are invariably feature poor and do poorly when real users get them in their hands. The team was so inwardly focused and they forgot the real world and things like users and features and market realities.

Some tech debt, some dirtiness and rough corners, show a living, breathing product reacting to its users and market and prioritizing value. But make sure you’re aware of what you’re accruing.

I would love it if Mermaid or PlantUML could export to Keynote or similar.

Interesting article, I think I actually understand a lot more than I usually do with physics articles. This quote stood out though. I lol’d:

“The Higgs field, on the other hand, is just as spinless as the Higgs boson. Like a college senior sitting forlorn in a career counselor’s office, it has no direction”.

Keynote on Mac fixes many of these complaints, I find it great for diagramming where presentation needs to be very crisp.

Agree with others that Mermaid and PlantUML are very useful, but sometimes you need high degrees of visual customization that they don’t give.

Meanwhile high of 61 predicted for NJ.

Ain’t weather chaos fun?

I don’t see how qualified immunity allows cops to void a person’s first amendment right to free speech. I will have to read this in more detail to see what the heck is going on.

Citation?

Bench is a thing.

Agreed.

But the point is there are “bursty” options if firms wish to to pursue it as an option.

> If the people you are hiring are doing the same work as full time employees, with the same work structure, you're not supposed to hire them as contractors.

This is not true at all. Many firms do “staff augmentation” for exactly what the parent described, bursty work for clients on a time and materials basis.

I can’t even comment on generic “Agile” because it is so vague as to be meaningless.

Many teams I have worked with who have been successful work out their own process but slap “Kanban” on it as a label. It may or may not be Kanban, but by calling it Kanban, it is “acceptable” by TPTB as acceptably checking the agile box for management.

Right, it was for controlling terminals originally.

I recall in the early 90s I worked for an ag chemical company as an intern. They had a horrid budgeting app written on some old crusty DB platform, I was asked to make the text interface “better”.

We accessed via VT terminal emulators, so I created a library of ANSI drawing primitives and created a primitive window / menu system out of it. It blew everyone’s mind at the time, but it was only a couple of week’s work.

* Edited to add a lot of DOS software and terminal stuff did similar things, including some nifty Terminate and Stay Resident utilities (TSR!).

Not what I meant. Back then you were either rich and had these golden opportunities, or you were like 99.999999% of humanity and had no chance at exceptionalism they would be noticed.

With the Internet and modern connectedness, things are very different.

I don’t think the models from those time periods work today.

Here in Western NJ, ash trees have been decimated by the emerald ash borer. The big impact is in communities with lots of ash trees are now getting constant power outages from dead trees coming down on lines. The power company is supposed to trim back dead trees near the lines (ever since Hurricane Sandy), but the ash decimation has overwhelmed them.

Our little town of 6,000 or so loses power 3-4 times a year. One road with lots of ash trees loses power 10x a year.

People are beyond UPS here and into generators.

Assuming an 8 hour day, that’s a deployment every 24 minutes, and that’s not good enough?

Why in Earth wouldn’t you coordinate releases? Seems like utter chaos.

You used them as exemplars.

Can you point out specifically where someone says releasing up to 20x a day into production for a paid platform is a good thing?

I am not talking about the capability. I grant being able to release quickly and often is desirable. I question the wisdom of actually releasing multiple times a day into production as a best practice. In my mind it is highly inefficient and offers too much churn for users (eg exactly my experience with Facebook, a chaotic broken product that changes hourly and makes people feel like the product t is gas lighting them).

See my comment elsewhere taking “people are the product” out of this conversation.

Facebook and Google and like companies do not care if they piss users off. They churn features constantly, break people’s flows on a regular basis, A-B test features so different people get different experiences.

They get away with this because the “users” aren’t users, they and their data are the product. You pay nothing to use their services, and you get what you pay for.

What’s interesting here is that the data was not collected secretly per se. White Castle used finger prints to unlock computers and access pay stubs, so employees had to know what was going on. The ruling is that they did not ask for and receive consent from those employees for years. The employee in question had been having her finger print scanned since 2004, and they only asked for consent in 2018.

Which begs the question, if they asked and an employee said “no”, what happens? Are they fired? Banned from register work?

Thanks for the response Al!

Very interesting. I agree different strokes for different folks, you guys seem to be on the extreme end of CI/CD.

Have you done any sort of analysis you could share on what it costs to release up to 20 times per day?

I consult across a few different industries, but it includes SaaS offerings. Many places could do multiple deploys to prod a day, but choose weekly releases or other longer cadences. This is to allow for documentation, client notifications, etc. It also is more efficient, constantly releasing requires a lot of resources, as this blog implies they are churning dozens of K8 pods several times a day.

I would think constant releasing would also make debugging prod issues pure hell.

The article starts with “Last year, we made the difficult decision to stop deploying any changes to production for one week” and goes on to talk about releases.

In that context I assume this means they make multiple production releases per day (which makes me shudder). I am curious how they do this while maintaining high quality and not driving customers insane.

Maybe I am just an old fuddy duddy conservative, but this struck me from the post:

“In the grand scheme of things, one week isn’t that long. But to us, it felt like forever. We are constantly iterating and release multiple changes every day”.

I assume they mean multiple production releases? Is this because the product lacks maturity or stability, or is it just your culture?

I am asking because I am trying to imagine the impact of this on existing customers. It sounds like an awful lot of churn.

This obviously happens a lot in the “you are the product” space like Facebook, Google, etc. But this looks to be a data analytics product with paid tiers. Curious what tooling and processes you have to support this, and how you keep customers happy with this model.

The simple answer is no.

What companies are enjoined from doing is purposefully working against the interests of the corporate good (and by extension shareholders). What that “good” is, is very fuzzy. But roughly speaking it means you can’t take gross actions that will clearly significantly harm the company, and that you know it will cause harm.

A good example would be Twitter. If it was still public, I think a case could be made the Musk took a number of gross actions that directly and materially harmed the company.

Our teams have found that it gets things done with the basics, but has no advanced anything. Chat is OK, video is OK, Files is OK, Channels are OK. But they are all basic. Things like wikis or anything more advanced is very primitive.

Plus of course some things like File are a thin facade over the horror that is Sharepoint, and you occasionally have to drop down into that swamp.

So not a horror show to me, but feels like ten years out of date or more.