sturgill

App level data integrity is usually critical. Ingestion into a reporting database is an entirely different construct (where I agree FK constraints are burdensome).

I’m pretty confident that GitHub doesn’t use foreign keys because it was built as a Rails app. And the “Rails Way” is to create these constraints in the model. Foreign key constraints weren’t a first-class member in Rails until v4 (if memory serves correctly).

I was once a full-time Rails dev and really loved the framework (I don’t write as many user facing applications these days). Most of the Omakase trade offs didn’t bother me. But I never understood the disdain for foreign keys. For 99.99% of web apps, you want them (dare I say, need them).

Even in Rails 3 I would add them by hand in the migration files. Very few applications will ever actually care about sharding. We were pulling in millions at the last Rails company I worked for and were just fine with a master and a single replica.

If you get to a point where sharding is best for your company you hopefully have enough revenue coming in to fund a data transition. Your goal should be to outgrow what MySQL (or Postgres) can do for you in master/replica mode. If you do, you’ll likely be independently wealthy...

If data integrity matters at all, model-based checks (or periodic queries for orphaned data) will not suffice. Just put a foreign key in the table where it belongs and let your DB do what it does best. ACID is an amazing thing...

Not necessarily a universal solution, but our family primarily shops at Aldi. You have to pay for bags, so you either bring your own or use the empty cardboard boxes from stocking the goods.

I’m pretty excited for the Disney+Hulu bundle. That and the content I get from my Prime membership (not to mention the ability to rent the odd movie/show from Amazon) is pretty close to everything I want.

Marvel/Disney/Star Wars/Simpsons... I’m good for awhile.

But should Ebony be allowed to market ads on Facebook and exclude white people? I honestly don’t know where I come down on this issue: it feels different to say, “we have a better ROI if we exclude certain demographics from seeing our ads” than to say “black people can’t eat at this diner.”

Let’s take a company like REI: is it wrong for them to put their stores in places that are most profitable? Should luxury good companies be required to have store fronts in inner cities?

I’m legitimately not sure I’m comfortable with either answer. “Women / older people are unlikely to respond to this ad; so we’ll have a better ROI by excluding those groups” feels awkward but like a legitimate business interest. If I sell male hygiene products can I exclude women from seeing the ads, not because I don’t like women but because the ad is less likely to be relevant?

“I don’t want to work with women or older people so I’ll not show them the ad” feels unquestionably wrong.

Hard pass. If you aren’t smart enough to open a free email account at any other provider just for the sake of your resume then I don’t want to work with you on anything important. I don’t care what your personal email address actually is, but I have no interest in working in an office full of bros.

That said, it’s a pretty funny joke (for high school).

I got an MBA from a fairly small private university. Speaking to the head of admissions he only wished the school had a D1 football team so that more people had heard of it.

There is a strong history of associating the identity of the school with its football program (though I expect this to wane as we learn more about the long-term impact of concussions). Let’s take Ohio State as an example: it is more compelling of a mid tier graduate program because of its success on the football field.

I don’t say that as a knock on OSU: they have fine academics. But being a Buckeye is very connected to the football team.

Same with Alabama. I currently live in Birmingham and when I relocated I was asked all the time, “whose your team?” That question only has two acceptable answers: Auburn or Alabama. There is no option for “none of the above.”

But I still expect this to wane given a long enough horizon. From a sample of one, I used to be very involved in college football and NFL fantasy football leagues. But over the last five years I’ve become less comfortable with the sport (it feels like watching a Roman gladiator match). I’m [edit: bearish] on the 15 year horizon for the sport: I think we’ve reached peak football.

I don’t know the particulars of your company but this got me thinking. There is a necessary shift somewhere in the spectrum:

[start up] —- [enterprise]

where you don’t know everyone who works with you nor does everyone know you. Everyone is a cog in a wheel (even if they don’t fully appreciate it). Everything is a system and human capital is just one of many inputs that the business _should_ optimize.

Companies that are too fat get replaced by ones that are lean, etc.

For me, there is some comfort in knowing that I’m as replaceable as anyone else. It helps me deal more humanely with others when you have to fire/lay-off/reduce hours. And it helps remind me that my professional work isn’t the essence of my life; it’s just one component of my own personal system. It has to be optimized alongside family commitments, volunteer work, and my own faith-based pursuits.

There is no benevolence in a system, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act benevolently towards each other.

It might sound crass, but you are unlikely to retire from your current job. And nor will your boss. In fact, one of my main focuses as a manager is to remind people of that fact along with this advice: when they start to feel the itch to move on, let me know if I can help them get experiences that will position them for the future.

TLDR; the business doesn’t care about you, but hopefully as an executive those that report to me always feel that I have treated them with human empathy.

Also, I strongly encourage you to build up your non-professional circles. Most of my closest friends are previously coworkers that I stay in touch with after one or the other inevitably moves on.

We’re way past the point in time where the system is designed for pensions and 50 yr watches.

I don’t mind text notices, but it will always have a higher latency than ringing my doorbell. The best though is getting alerts about a delivery and then going on a scavenger hunt to find the package. Will it be on the front porch? Will it be tucked behind a bush? Maybe I left my garage door open so the driver helpfully left it there...

Additionally, I have yet to ever have a driver ring the doorbell. They throw it at the house, mark it as complete, and trust that I’ll stumble across it later.

S3 was (and is) amazing. But for me AWS as an infrastructure replacement started when EC2 was launched (at least in the context of the current discussion relative to WeWork).

It’s also never a convenient time to buy a new physical server and set it up in a colo facility while managing DR. Especially when your bread and butter is a CRUD app.

AWS in the early days wasn’t that different than many other cloud providers of the day: you had Rackspace, Linode, Slicehost, etc. And then there’s the oversold shared hosting...

WeWork isn’t a brand new offering; Regus has been around for awhile. But it has mindshare and that has value.

The question is will it be an AWS or pets.com. I won’t answer that for you, but I’m not putting my money into its IPO... ;)

In short: yes. A $1k monthly expense is a lot easier to book than a $12k purchase that depreciates over time.

And from an investor point of view, if the business fails you don’t have to worry about the sell off / write down of any hardware that was purchased to get the company started.

The simplification of OpEx vs CapEx is worth a decent premium, especially in the early days when no one knows if the company really has a chance and everyone is scrambling to figure out what you’ll be when you grow up (aka product / market fit).

I thought his AWS comparison was more favorable than it seems you did. I remember launching a startup in 2009 and our head investor (who was a CFO at a bespoke insurance firm) was floored when he saw our financial docs and that we were able to make our infrastructure expenses OpEx instead of CapEx.

As AWS got its start making it easy for startups to get access to infrastructure, the bull case for WeWork is that startups choose that environment over signing a traditional lease. It’s not that a startup can’t work out of a coffee shop, just like we could have theoretically run our own email servers. But a physical location and address has advantages and WeWork opens that to more people with less friction than the pre-WeWork options.

But that’s the bull case. I’m not a financial analyst and I’m not your financial analyst so this isn’t financial advice, but my risk profile tells me to pass on this opportunity...

Sounds like the plot line for Avengers vs Thanos... Life would just be so much better if there was less of it.

Use a WSJ link from Bitly into Outline and it works again...

It’s much harder to side load apps on an iPhone.

“Could you please align these variable definitions so they’re easier to read.” Is considered a polite imperative [0].

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/question-mark-...

To be fair to LookML, it does some great things (kind of like SASS vs CSS). It's great defining constraints in a single variable and then being able to reuse those constraints in any query. It's also wonderful being able to set both default and global constraints: the first can be overwritten, but the second can't.

I was once part of a project where we had certain users and payments we would flag as invalid (for fraud or other reasons). We wanted those records in our data warehouse for very specific reports, but never wanted anyone who was consuming reports to be able to include them in final counts. A global constraint in the LookML definition was a perfect answer. I could still run specific reports directly against Redshift, but there was no concern that a less technical manager would get confused.

I'm not associated with Looker in any way, but have really enjoyed working with their product. I was really hoping they'd stay on the path of independence and IPO, but I can't fault them for taking billions of dollars and calling it a day...

I'm a huge fan of Looker, but I'm not sure how I feel about this news. The best parts of Looker:

- It connects directly to your existing data warehouse. Most BI tools suck in your data into their datastore; Looker queries your database directly. If you wanted Looker to cache results for performance reasons, you could set up a dedicated schema in Redshift for example and only give write privileges to that one schema. But even the cached dataset was stored directly in your data warehouse.

- It is platform agnostic.

- LookML is backed by Git. By default, changes to your LookML definitions are pushed to a Looker-owned Github repo, but you can change this so that the repo is under your control as well.

- The support is pretty phenomenal.

There's that unsettled part in me that's wondering the over/under on two years before we get the next announcement: to give you better performance, it's tightly integrated with BigQuery; LookML is getting long in the tooth so we've gone ahead and created the views you'll need which are now accessible via the Google Analytics interface; you can go ahead and forward your concerns to /dev/null.

Apple has argued that developers are its customers (in the Pepper lawsuit). What options do developers have? Ignore the iOS market (those most likely to pay money)? There isn't a choice here: you let Apple have 1/3 of all of your revenue and you implement Apple Sign In. Because... competition?...

Only if they grandfather existing apps. We made the decision a long time ago to support FB login. That decision now requires us to either stop having an app in iOS, remove FB login (which a good portion of people use exclusively), or implement a new authentication provider _that won't work for people that already have an account with us_.

Again, the tech is fine. The strong-arm is indefensible.

And Apple Sign In helps this user, how?...

My problem is that I don’t get to choose if your business is worth the implementation cost. Because we’re already in bed with FB we will be forced to implement. It’s the “have to” I’m arguing against, not the feature.

Because thousands of people already have an account tied to a specific email and are going to click the Apple button and get really mad when we can’t log them in.

We let people create a username/password but can also use FB if they prefer. Turns out having their email is nice; we need to send them notices and reminders from time-to-time.

I’m not a FB fan. I post on social media maybe twice a year. As an advertiser I don’t trust the numbers they report. None of my criticisms of Apple in this decision should be interpreted as pro-FB. I just have a very strong distaste for Apple deciding that they get to decide how we run our apps.

They have to mandate usage because it’s the only way devs will do it. And it seems like a fine enough product for Apple-only hardware. But when you get to supporting multiple connected devices it falls apart. Are they going to support this for PCs? What about on the Roku? How will anyone who uses Apple Sign In on the iPhone log in anywhere else?

But someone who has already signed up via FB is going to click that button and then get angry when we can’t log them into their account.

I personally don’t use FB login. And I use `+merchant` to keep track of bad actors. But from a merchant perspective this will likely be a chore. And Apple has decided that we don’t get to decide if it’s worth it. We can’t disable FB login because we’ve supported it for a long time and a ton of accounts only have a FB-synced profile.

To be clear, it’s not the product I have issue with. It’s the draconian ultimatum that because we are in bed with FB we have to also get in bed with Apple Sign In.

They could have just built this into their form system. It already recommends my personal email / credit card / auto generated password. Why not prepopulate / suggest an Apple-generated email? Why force the merchant to implement another standard which breaks all other SSO integrations _by design_?

I don’t have answers to those questions. If this was a consumer feature embedded into their keyboard I’d be ecstatic. Strong arming merchants to implement and bear the full cost of confused consumers who can’t seem to login to their app _even when they click the Apple button_ is inexplicable (to me).

Or they already rely on FB login and are now _obligated_ by Apple to implement this feature. I work for a company that has allowed people to create accounts with FB login (meaning we don’t have an internal password associated with them). This change would ostensibly require us to also allow Apple Sign In _even if we don’t want to_ just to continue to service existing users.

There really isn’t much choice here for us. Leave Apple / iOS? Abandon FB login and piss off thousands of people? Implement Apple Sign In regardless of its tech stack / requirements?

But this explicitly doesn’t work as an SSO. How can I tie that back to the actual email address they would have used to create an account using their FB / Google account?

This sounds like a tremendous headache that I really don’t want to worry about. But Apple is looking to leverage their power in the app market to force me to implement a tool I may not be interested in as a merchant?

I despise being strong armed. I hope the EU crushes this.