General Commentary – Page 2 – Software and Other Shenanigans

Will platform engineering be the mass-reproducible secret to great software development?

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Nov 302022

When people talk about the “death of DevOps,” platform engineering is brought up as its successor. That’s probably overstating things. The practices associated with platform engineering certainly look like they have a lot to offer, but getting platform engineering right is difficult. And getting platform engineering right is important, because that’s the only way platform engineering is going to work. Otherwise, what you’re going to end up with is a mashed-up team of random engineers desperately trying to keep infrastructure afloat while developers wreak havoc on everything.

Is DevOps dead?

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Oct 312022

I came across an article titled “Devs don’t want to do ops” that started with the premise that developers managing their own production infrastructure is stressful (it is), questioned whether development and operations should be separated again, and settled on declaring “DevOps is dead,” and that platform engineering is the future. It was quite a ride. It also raised some good questions about DevOps, and the ideal approach to building and running code. Is DevOps really dead? Is platform engineering really the future? What does it mean to “own your own code in production?”

On true believers and mercenaries

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Sep 302022

If you see any sort of headlines about CEOs and remote work, then you likely heard that Malcolm Gladwell does not like remote work. I had some thoughts on why I think his position (and others like it) is stupid. My position is hardly uncommon – most of the arguments for returning to the office revolve around saying either a) people can’t collaborate unless they’re in the same room (the fact that team-based jobs kept up just fine since Covid happened thoroughly disproved that), b) we need it for the “culture” (“culture” has nothing to do with physical proximity, and isn’t as valued as some people think it is – although looking at that meme makes me miss the days when we at least got cubicles), or c) people aren’t productive working from home (they weren’t productive in the office either, you just thought they were because you saw them sitting at a desk). In my tweet thread, I brought up a personal hypothesis that you can group most people into 1 of 2 groups, “true believers” and “mercenaries,” that I thought warranted more details than you can get on Twitter.

When to give the “back-end API” a REST

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Jul 312022

I wrote recently about how what most of us build as back-ends aren’t really APIs, but just a back-end that provides data to your Javascript. I’ve emphasized the fact that a basic RESTful back-end is not, in fact, an API, and that there are differences between how you build and run the 2. However, there are also very important similarities to REST back-ends and APIs that you need to remember.

New approaches to skilling up future workers

General Commentary, Shenanigans, Work No Responses »

Apr 302022

So a (semi-) local coding boot camp is going to be trying something that I really hope works out – partnering with a local company to sponsor and ultimately hire the graduates. I love this idea because of the way it shifts the financial risks in training people for future careers, the direct contrast it puts colleges in, and the fact that a set up like this is inherently designed to make the “graduating class” more successful, and not just because a higher percentage of them got their first job quickly.

Truth and speech on the Internet

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Mar 312022

Something broke with our approach to disagreements. We went from simply arguing with people who were wrong on the Internet to to demands that people be deplatformed because they’re wrong, according to people who seem to be right equally rarely. Thanks to the aggregation of content onto a few major platforms, a few people have the arbitrary ability to make other people vanish from public discourse. At this point, it’s impossible to tell who’s right, who’s wrong, and who’s been disappeared for having views deemed “unacceptable” by people who have no business making that determination. It’s starting to seem like the reason you can’t trust just anything you see online has moved from “anybody can post anything on the Internet” to “because publishing anything too contrarian will get you kicked off.” That’s not good.

From the “stuff I screwed up” files – the missing email link test

General Commentary, Programming, Stuff I Screwed Up, Work No Responses »

Feb 282022

I was working on hotfix that turned hotter than I wanted during the deployment, all because we missed an important test case that left us scrambling to resolve an issue during the deployment that we should have caught earlier. We got lucky and fixed it during the deployment, but we shouldn’t have been in that position because the scenario that failed was a known requirement, which means we should have tested it. So what happened? Well, point blank, we forgot a test case.

If you thought meetings were productivity killers, wait till you try development by committee

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Nov 302021

I’m no fan of “professional meeting attendance” as a career path, but at least that limits the damage it inflicts on an organization. Meetings can be skipped or at least you can bring a laptop and work through them. Sometimes, they’re actually useful. But I’ve never seen anything bring development to a grinding halt like having an external team demand the authority to oversee, and overrule, product decisions made by the teams that are supposed to own those products. When that happens, there’s a step in the development process that literally consists of “come to a full stop and beg permission to do your job.”

What it means to actually run an API

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Oct 312021

It’s really popular to say we’re writing web services, built on top of RESTful APIs, but the reality is what most of us are really doing is writing web applications that make REST calls back to that app’s server for data, not actually calling a generalized web service with multiple sets of users. That’s fine – I use web applications almost all day just like everyone else. Occasionally we need to actually get some data from another team’s data store, and it’s cool, they have an endpoint you can hit and get it. See? Web services with RESTful APIs. The problem is there’s a difference between, “There’s an endpoint that can give us that data” and running a service who’s purpose is to be used by anyone other than the team that wrote it. Continue reading »

None of this has been “in spite of working remotely”

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Sep 302021

1 of the biggest gripes I’ve had lately is people describing working remotely as some sort of impediment to companies being successful. It may not have been something your organization wasn’t doing before and had to adjust to, but for office jobs, working remotely is something that’s been entirely possible for years. In fact, companies like StackOverflow and Basecamp have not only been remote for years, but have written about being successful remote companies extensively, for years (Basecamp even literally wrote a book on making remote work, work). Remote work had slowly been growing in popularity before the pandemic as people started pushing for the flexibility and to drop the requirement to either deal with long commutes or living in expensive cities.

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