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flavorjones

79 karma · joined August 6, 2010

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flavorjones··on Enterprise-Fu
I can see how the slides might come across as confrontational or not-collaborative; but when I gave the talk in person I think the message was much more positive.

One of the core ideas is to identify -- and even search out! -- people who you can collaborate with. For the people who will put obstacles in your way, either find a way to work around them, or find a way to align them to your team's goals. Avoiding open conflict is a big part of the message, and I'm sorry it didn't come through in the slides.

On the topic of "career-limiting" moves, that might be true, but I think there's some nuance. If you know what is the right thing to do for your employer, and you're afraid to do it because you might get fired, you're gonna have a bad time. My advice is to get past your fears and do the right thing and take some risks, or else buckle up for a career of quiet desperation that is likely limited by your avoidance of responsibility and the absence of meaningful successes.

flavorjones··on Enterprise-Fu
Hmm. I don't think my opinions have changed too much.

I would _definitely_ present these ideas differently today; the language we all use to describe problems and solutions has changed quite a bit in the meantime.

And how I _apply_ these tactics and strategies is much less confrontational than when I was in fintech, mostly because I'm older and more patient.

But the essence of the advice in here is still a big part of how I work: having a technical roadmap to match the product roadmap; getting small wins on the path to long-term goals; talking about what you've built and showing it off; taking responsibility for product and design decisions if nobody else is; building a team who will share ownership; diagnosing dysfunction with Vaillant's defense mechanisms; using estimates to pay off technical debt and experiment with new technology and approaches. All of these tactics and strategies are still valuable in my opinion.

flavorjones··on Enterprise-Fu
No video, sadly. The Enterprise Agile 2013 conference didn't record the talks, and otherwise I've only given it at a lunchtime "tech talk" for my co-workers.
flavorjones··on Enterprise-Fu
:wave: Hey all. I'm the author. This content is over ten years old now (2013), as is the slide tech backing it.

Hopefully it's obvious that the click-to-advance is a style that suits my presentation style, and I would have made different choices if I intended it to be consumed online.

In any case, I've learned a lot since this talk and have on occasion considered updating it. I'm pretty surprised it's trending, TBH.

flavorjones··on Pitchfork: Rack HTTP server for shared-nothing architecture
Howdy, I'm on the Shopify team that is working on both pitchfork and a few different performance-improvement projects for Ruby. There's a ton of activity around Ruby performance right now!

I think we're entering a period of increased experimentation and rapid evolution as demonstrated by projects like YJIT[1][2], improved inline caching[3][4] and Object Shapes[5] (also used by V8), and variable-width allocation[6][7], and smaller improvements like better constant invalidation[8]. Significant investments in TruffleRuby[9] are still going on by Oracle, Shopify, and other companies.

And recently, Takashi Kokubun gave a talk at Ruby Kaigi about the future of JIT compilers in Ruby that gives a peek at a whole new set of optimizations Ruby can work on (as well as some performance comparisons against other interpreted languages)[10]. You may be surprised to see how well Ruby (with the JIT enabled) performs compared to Python 3.

All of which is to say, I think there's quite a bit of performance improvement being made in recent Rubies, and that trend will likely continue for quite some time.

update And I forgot to mention that some very notable computer science researchers and their teams are working in the Ruby community now![11]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28938446) [2]: https://speed.yjit.org/ [3]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18943 [4]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18875 [5]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18776 [6]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18045 [7]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18634 [8]: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18589 [9]: https://eregon.me/blog/2022/01/06/benchmarking-cruby-mjit-yj... [10]: https://speakerdeck.com/k0kubun/rubykaigi-2022 [11]: https://shopify.engineering/shopify-ruby-at-scale-research-i...

flavorjones··on Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler
(I helped make the case internally at Shopify.) The key points we emphasized are in the Ruby Shield announcement, but to summarize:

- Attacks on supply chains are way up

- Use of open-source software is way up

- Shopify is already contributing engineering time to bundler and rubygems.org

- And there is additional shovel-ready work that Ruby Central could execute on with a financial contribution.

Proactive security work now reduces the chances of a successful supply chain attack and the costs associated with recovery, investigation, and mitigation in addition to reputational damage.

There are secondary benefits, too: when we're confident in the supply chain, we can more confidently update our dependencies in a timely fashion, meaning our developers have access to the newest library features; and we're able to patch known vulnerabilities faster. We invest a lot in feedback loops internally, and this is just another facet of that build/measure/learn cycle.

flavorjones··on Ruby type conversion
Just a reminder of how much of YC's portfolio value is based on firms that chose Ruby:

https://charliereese.ca/article/top-50-y-combinator-tech-sta...

https://twitter.com/logicmason/status/1371255029412233218