artellectual

Then what can you trust? Your own hardware? What about if they go bad? Make multiple copies? How many? And what are the implications of managing multiple local backups scattered everywhere on your own hardware? What are the costs involved? How many people should handle that? Who should hold the encryption key? How many keys? What happens if key is exposed and we have to regenerate?

At the end of the day every system has risks. It’s about what is acceptable. It’s engineer’s job to reduce risk. In my case I didn’t say what is right or wrong I just mentioned that increased risk is coming at regulator’s decision they should acknowledge and sign a piece of paper.

When you make decisions there are repercussions, you have to accept. That’s all.

Lol you obviously didn’t read my comment. We have backups... scattered all through out the multiple regions. They just want it on “local soil”. As in it should not be in another country.

> why is it in the cloud?

Because we’re allowed to use cloud.

I’m facing this challenge right now with a regulator.

We have a financial system, that uses managed cloud SQL hosted in one of the regions. The database is also in high availability mode and has daily backup scattered all over the various regions.

All this is being managed by the cloud provider we are using.

One of the regulator has asked us to maintain a “local backup” of the database. When I asked what the reason is they just said “we require it”.

Since creating another copy of the database outside the managed environment increases risk I told them “based on my assessment we are deliberately increasing risk of a vulnerability, it’s my job to report and you to sign that you have acknowledged the increase in risk based on assessment”.... No response from the regulator that this is now required.

I can relate to what these guys are going through mostly I find regulators just read an old book and since they are usually regulators not engineers they use the rule book to make engineering decisions. While regulators have to follow a book and its their job its also important for them to understand that every system is different and that they are not experts, and that the book they follow are not always up-to-date.

Sometimes the regulators job is also to say “let me check on that” and find another expert or better yet consult with the person who wrote the book to “update” and improve on the “standard” to ensure that the highest standard is being propagated to all the parties they manage.

Because who do you contact for support when something goes wrong?

The problem cryptocurrency industry doesn't understand is when you work in finance you are heavily regulated. You cannot just work with "decentralized" systems and call it a day. Every action you do is answerable, everything is questioned and scrutinized.

Having someone like Ripple and XCurrent as an intermediate as a regulated company helps solve a lot of problems. Since Ripple itself is regulated it's easy to justify to regulators. Ripple is also answerable when transactions delay happens.

For Etherereum / Smartcontracts who do you contact for support when transactions SLAs aren't being met?

Actually Ripple is not Vaporware. I work for an MTO and we use ripple XCurrent product. XRP enables MTOs to send / receive without having to use USD as an intermediary currency. This reduces costs on money transfer and also enables money transfer even when US banks are on holiday. So I can say there is real value in the network Ripple is building and also XRP itself being used as the tool for cross border remittance.

As far as I can see they're delivering on their promises.

As someone who works as a leader of a tech team building a financial engine, from my personal experience. When teams are doing overtime it means some bad management happened somewhere. Either someone under-estimated the scope and was never adjusted / communicated, or someone couldn't keep promise of not changing things as a result the developers and final product suffer.

Software projects are very difficult to estimate. Especially when you are building 'one of a kind' products. How do you give an estimate of something you've never built. You may know how efficient your team is at building a past product but you do not know about the upcoming problems you will face when building something new.

After working on a project for sometime you have a better idea and give better estimates however pinning 'deadlines' on a 'one of a kind' product never works out.

This is just another one of those cases. They should have just released the PC version first, and the other consoles could have come later. It would have been a better release for everyone and a better product.

Having engineers work overtime also is generally quite bad. Engineers are humans they get tired, when they're tired they make more mistakes. I guess it shows very clearly in this game all the 'mistakes' the developers made.

How long did they spend making this game? And to rush it at the last minute to hit a 'deadline' and to have an outcome like this. Was it worth it?

Final Cut uses GPU for encoding / exporting as well, I believe.

Looks like Final Cut to me, which is Apple's software.

That in and of itself is a testament to how problematic our man-made legal system is.

Compare a nature made system to a man made system.

Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.

I'm a customer of Tailwind UI and I have to say I'm very inspired by this post. Great product, solves a real problem. It's bound to reach this point. Great work!

I just got my 4 year old macbook pro's battery replaced. The guy who did it also cleaned up the internals. I can easily use my laptop for another 2-3 years. I spent 100 USD to get it cleaned and battery replaced. Best 100 USD spent.

Feeling the burn right now on this. I collect a $9 a month for my videos that have helped thousands of people learn to code and get their jobs. For over 3 years of running it I have not had a single dispute until now. One of my customers subscribed and has been watching my content for 2 months and decided that he is now done and decided to file a dispute.

Before I could even email them any evidence or make my case I was told I would most likely lose this dispute. My payment gateway told me they would charge me $500 for arbitration fee if I lost the dispute. I forwarded them my t&c and proof that the customer has used my site and content. I even reached out to the customer to ask why they did what they did, no answer.

It’s a crappy system and online payments is broken. Credit card and payment processing is hugely broken and far behind the times.

Fortunately I am in the position to do something about it. My team and I just recently finished building and launched a new payment engine, we have already started processing payments in the millions of dollars just a few months in and will be taking on Banks, VISA, MasterCard and all traditional payment platforms. It sounds far fetched but when I’ve decided to tackle something I don’t fail. I’ve made it a personal goal to innovate in the payment space. I’m so very excited about the future.

This is wonderful news for me. I host a video on demand site Codemy.net and all the original source videos are on backblaze. Originally I had to write a library to connect to the backblaze api. Now I look forward to using the existing aws client libraries, one less thing I have to maintain.

No they struggle because they don’t know the workflow which is what gitflow teaches them. Once they learn it things work very well and they go on to teach other people.

On the contrary my team and I have been having great luck with git-flow.

When I onboard a new team member I watch them struggle with git-flow and for me that's a great thing to see because I see them learning an efficient way to work.

Once they 'get it' everything flows smoothly, and everyone has the same way of working which makes it very easy to see and help debug when things happen. Communication is also consistent across all team members partly because of the git-flow branching model. We as a team understand why / when to use feature branch, when to use hotfix, when to cut a release etc... That's what I expect from a team. Git flow has been great for our team and workflow.

To each their own. I guess I will continue recommending git-flow.

You said it man. I agree with you.

I think most people who flock to Micro Services are looking for a better design / architecture choice for software. The thing that Micro Service can teach you is Single Responsibility Principle and learning to segregate responsibility. You need to define a clear scope of the 'modules' in your system.

At the end of the day if you don't architect your system correctly Monolith / Micro Services won't help you.

For me and my team now I have 1 ideaology regarding this topic. I don't care whether it's monolith or micro service. As long as I can have clear segregation of responsibility between the different modules. Our company now has a monolith (core banking app) that has modules that handle their own responsibility and communicate whether its over http or internal communication bus we developed it doesn't matter. We can easily move modules out into a separate service if we need.

What determines the factor of whether we move things into it's own service? A few things. If we need to deploy / scale something independently we will decide to take on the overhead and move things out into their own external service. Or if something has a specific security requirement that will increase the complexity of the overall system we will isolate that and deploy it separately. Otherwise we keep things as a monolith. For example in Banking there are many things like the ledger / transaction data that are highly sensitve that require certain security requirements like being hosted on a cloud that has certain standards. We will deploy this part on GCP. But

People seem to love to stereotype and find a one solution fits all. There is no such thing. Everything in engineering requires a deep level of understanding of the problem and making choices and the problems present itself.

I believe most apps can start their life out as a monolith, and can grow and divide as needed. There just isn't a one size fits all for anything in tech. That's what I've learned.

I was one of the members of 3dbuzz early on. It pretty much shaped my career. I now run my own video tutorial site (codemy.net) because I was inspired by 3DBuzz.

I got my first job because of content from 3DBuzz. Later focussed on web development and now I'm here working in a very good job / able to start my own projects. Most of it started at 3DBuzz. So this is a very sad day for me.

I remember when Jason passed away that was devastating. I reached out to some members (who are now working at Epic / Microsoft). 3DBuzz set me (and many other people I know) up for life.

I just got the iPad Pro and have been using the iPadOS beta for the past few months. I don’t know how I was doing without it before.

I now have a place where I can sketch my architecture diagrams, wireframes, live sketching for my team when I work. Everything is in one place and does not get lost. I can plug it into a projector and write notes on things to explain things to my team. Doing presentations is easy. I now pretty much only use my MacBook Pro for coding. Almost every other task is done on my iPad Pro.

My 2 most used apps at this point are Concepts and Flow by moleskine.

It’s become a boon to my workflow.

I built a solution for server side rendering using Elixir / Plug and Chrome Headless via Chroxy. It simplifies server side rendering greatly since it doesn’t care about the client side library you use. I have been using it to power my site[1] which is written in React.

I also happen to make the Elixir Foundation series of videos[2] that show how to do serverside rendering using elixir. So I’m dog fooding the dog food.

[1] https://www.codemy.net

[2] https://www.codemy.net/sets/elixir-foundation

I migrated away from react-router because from v3 to v4 broke everything that made sense. Things became wildly more complicated.

I'm now extremely happy with my new router of choice router5 (not to be confused with React Router 5) https://router5.js.org.

I feel like this argument of Monolith vs Microservice is really a discussion about premature optimization. There is nothing wrong with starting out with a monolith with great design. Limiting the responsibility of the monolith is the key I believe to a maintainable piece of software. Should you need something or your business needs grow to be outside of that defined responsibility creating a new service should be discussed.

For example I have a service that hosts / streams videos. I have 1 service that handles all the metadata of the video. Handle users, discussions etc... one could even think of this as a monolith. Then video encoding piece started interfering with the metadata stuff so I decided it might be smart to separate the video encoding into its own service since it had different scaling requirements from the metadata server.

In that specific case it made a lot of sense to have 2 services I can justify it with the following reasons.

- Resource isolation is important to the performance of the application.

- having the ability to scale the encoder workers out horizontally makes sense.

So now it makes sense I’m managing 2 services.

There should be a lot of thought and reasoning behind doing engineering work. I think following trends is great for fashion products like jeans / shirts etc... but not for engineering.

If you are starting a project doing microservices chances are you are optimizing prematurely. That’s just my 2cent.

That is cool. I've been stalking Mux for a while. Since I've had to implement some of the things Mux offers on my own.

I actually completed the video streaming part of my CMS right before Mux offered /video service. By that time it was too late lol I had already solved most of the problems.

Also saw that you guys use elixir on your backend which was coincidentally was also my language of choice.

I don't think you can, because Cloudflare Video CDN is a separate product. So offering it a long with your business / free package is against your business interest. Cloudflare basically tried to sell me a $1000 / month (minimum) Video CDN. But if it was a mistake and should this be able to work using Cloudflare I would happily pay to upgrade to the business plan. I can afford 20-40 USD / month not $1000

CDNPerf is great. I actually used them to choose which CDN to use for video on demand streaming. I ended up going with Google CDN. My benchmark was how many complaints I got from students on my platform[1].

- Cloudflare doesn't distribute hls segments they will just route everything to LAX

- Bunny CDN had a few

- KeyCDN had a few but better than Bunny CDN

- StackPath had a few but better than Bunny CDN

- Google CDN had 0 complaints

No youtube, Vimeo etc...

All video streaming / hosting is done in house. Streams about 500GB to 600GB / month.

I pay about 40 USD / month for Google CDN bandwidth. I used CDNPerf pricing calculator, it's spot on.

[1] https://www.codemy.net.

I don't pray, go to the temple, or do anything regarded as 'practicing' Buddhism, however I went through a very rough patch in life and I have to say Buddhism helped me out ALOT. It helped me learn to be calm even when the entire world (relatively speaking) is on fire. It taught me to navigate tough times with dignity, and come out on the other side stronger and in faith that things will be good.

The Buddhist concept discussed in this article is one of the 3 marks of existence in this article it is referred to as Anitya however it's synonymous with Anicca[1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_marks_of_existence#Anicc...

DHH the founder of Basecamp, and creator of Rails talks about this constantly on Twitter. He talks about the importance of living a balanced life. Also written many books about work / life balance.

Lol the title immediately made me think of this https://imgur.com/gallery/pux7Pn8

The speed of making progress was discussed. I feel like twitter has slowed down after they switched away from Rails. Maybe technically speaking they are having problem with Scala in terms of development speed? Does anyone know the specifics?

China is also feeling the effect. In Thailand right now there are entire villages / neighborhoods full of Chinese immigrants who have migrated away from China. Once they tasted freedom going back to live just isn’t feasible anymore. So much do the that now the Chinese government have stopped people from moving large amounts of cash out of the country to buy real estate outside of China. They are definitely feeling the effect.

I also know a lot of foreigners who have been operating businesses in China for the past 7 years and are now moving out because they feel their civil / organizational liberties are being invaded.

People find ways of revolting without being killed. Freedom is a powerful force. Blocking and controlling is like a game of whack a mole. There is one of you and billions of moles, the Chinese government and Russian government are fighting a losing battle. Of course none of this is reported because of censorship. But if you read the news and you understand what’s going on on the ground level it all makes sense.