slively

Ah I see, I could definitely see that being a useful heuristic. Also it seems like the origins of micro services comes from places like Google that use a mono repo. The proof is in the pudding in the end I suppose.

This is a common mis-conception that the application design and/or deployment is tied to the repo or repos. They are completely orthogonal. Micro services can be done in mono or multi repo. A distributed monolith can be done in mono or multi repo. Either can also be done without version control.

Lots of union and coop workers work more than 8 hours a day.

I think you mis-understand that unions and coops are about employees having a say. If the employees want to work more for less in exchange for equity they can. All unions are not the same, because the union is the workers.

You say working at a startup should be worse, but really it’s trading things. You get to learn and experience more. More equity instead of higher wages, and greater access to leadership. I work at one right now, I get it. I think this is what your saying, and workers know this. A union does not preclude this arrangement. Also the people that are willing to work at a startup tend to be more invested and want more of a say in the company. If the company succeeds I argue they deserve a seat at the table as they built it along with the founders more than any investor.

So many comments in this post setup imaginary straw men for what a union would do, then argue against that. The union is the employees, and employees at startups are not trying to kill a company and gate keep jobs.

Nobody said anything about removing the profit incentive. Workers having a say can be setup in a lot of way, it does not require direct veto power. There have been and are many successful coops. The argument is these are not somebody else’s company, it is the workers company because they built it. That’s a lot of straw men you are arguing against.

Employees did not agree to the systems of corporate governance we have. There is no real choice, and not working means starving. Nobody is pretending we live in a different system, they are trying to change it. The level of defeatism you are showing is unfortunate. “It has worked out best” is a pretty amazing assertion to make.

Employees do not have a say, that’s the discussion. It seems like you are arguing that a startup has to have worse working conditions for employees than other companies.

This argument that “if you don’t like it you can leave” is just too simple, and not in good faith. There are more options in the world than staying and going, and there’s more to it than not liking a job. I encourage you to stop thinking so black and white and have the courage to live in the grey area, because that’s where reality lies.

It’s amazing how easy it is for all of us to just take for granted that we are powerless at work and the only way to gain power is to create a company and disempower others.

Is it so hard to imagine doing it differently?

I’ve gotta be honest here, I really don’t know what you’re trying to say. Workers having a say at their workplace is a burden? Working at a big company somehow solves this? Having a say at your workplace and working at a startup is too much entitlement, you can only have one?

You are sidestepping a massive amount of factors that allows somebody to create their own business. Even then, a company grows on the backs of its employees, and there quickly comes a time when a single person should not have complete control because it’s not just theirs anymore.

I own shares in public companies and have basically zero say in how they operate and those shares are worth quite a bit.

At this point it’s clear these arguments are flippant and not serious. I hope one day you can have a perspective on these issues that is not so shallow. They are important and you also should have a say in your workplace. Our voices matter.

If the solution to a problem is have lots of money, it’s a solution for only a tiny portion of people, and not generally applicable.

To say this person joined and then tried to subvert is a pretty dishonest reading of this story. They worked on something for 12 years and I’m sure there were many others similarly invested. To spend such a significant portion of your life on something and have basically no input on how it’s run, directed, etc… is not a good system. In my opinion the people forming the union had much more invested in this company than the people that just invested money. I’d say the handful of people that insist on complete control for having invested money are a cancer to the org and society at large.

Here is the same story again. Sorry to hear about the inevitable ending, but glad they got to experience a good work culture for a time. At some point I hope we can shift the union discussion from just benefits and wages (which are not the biggest problems for SWE), to workers having a say in how a company operates. The idea that investing money garners complete control of a company is not healthy for the company or society at large. Workers risk more for the company and know more about what makes it succeed.

I’ve been wanting something like this but there’s a few big things that stick out to me. Why is it configured via json instead of scripting? Declarative task/build tools are just not as nice as something where you can write code. Specifying a task input/output seems very limited and is where so much optimization comes from. The remote cache seems to only be available through some hosted service?

I use Gradle a lot (bazel a little) and would love a tool that’s got an api that’s easier to understand, but this seems like 100 steps backwards without a good path forward.

Well that’s exciting, congratulations to the SQLite team. The new type checking and json support makes SQLite a pretty amazing option for even more use cases.

I tend to think of it the same way I think of moving to an eventually consistent database. You do it when you have to, and as little as possible.

You correctly identified the overhead of these approaches is massive and has implications bigger than the software. The impact on developers cannot be understated.

The approaches you listed are useful, and the dissent I have isn’t so much on the approach, as the timing of when it gets used. Tons of software will never need its benefits and shouldn’t pay the tax ever. Paying the tax before you have to is very rarely worth it in my experience.

> A lot of services used by middle class and even upper middle class people essentially depend on wage differentials.

Definitely seems like an abundance of businesses that are not profitable. They are just able to effectively rob their employees enough to keep going.

Agreed, refreshing to see a main headline and story actually capturing the state of low wage labor in the US, along side a small but growing movement of people no longer willing to put up with it.

This is honestly quite exciting.

We use it as a rest api framework for a react front end and it’s just fine. Performance is not really and issue for us so far. If you like express you will like Ktor, but you will find less libraries for middleware stuff. Exposed is also pretty nice as a JDBC wrapper and object mapper. If you like composing libraries over using a framework then it’s a good choice. If you are invested in coroutines like us Ktor is great, but Exposed isn’t really async all the way through and you’d want something like r2dbc ideally. Exposed has a wrapper for coroutines though.

Clikt is a nice config parser as well, and Koin is fine for DI. Jackson has good Kotlin support, and I haven’t tried the Kotlin serialization package yet but it looks interesting.

These days i prefer some of the library stitching done for me and would probably opt for spring boot and webflux which has nice Kotlin and coroutine support now.

This was my perspective as well when I worked in a cost center. Working for a company that sees making software as something that generates profit entirely changed the relationship. I would personally rename this article “don’t work in a cost center, even as a programmer.” Because then are you treated as a tool whose cost must be minimized and hopefully eliminated. As opposed to a golden goose that must be nurtured.