Programming – Software and Other Shenanigans

Data ingestion sucks

Aug 312023

If you spend any time on any system that involves importing data, and you’ll likely have heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).” It’s usually muttered (obscenities optional) right around the point a developer has given up on trying to “fix” the data coming into a system and willing to abandon users to whatever crappy, unusable, incorrect data they have floating around on their system. As long as whatever junk users were importing doesn’t actually break your code, let them suffer.

Knowledge sharing across development teams is hard

General Commentary, Programming No Responses »

Jul 312023

The world is full of applications that are big enough that companies need multiple development teams to work on them. No matter how these teams are organized (but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess they’re not completely cross-functional, even ignoring the hard parts). The benefits to organizing multiple software teams is they can operate independently, but the downside is that any best practices learned are hard to propagate across teams. After all, the whole point is they only need to interact with each other to inform each other of service-level changes. So how can all these development teams actually learn (and adopt) best practices?

From the “stuff I screwed up” files – caching was a bad choice

Programming, Stuff I Screwed Up, Work No Responses »

Jun 302023

OK, so the phrase “caching was a bad choice” isn’t exactly something you expect to hear about software development. Generally, caching is a good thing – it improves performance by reducing calls to your database or external services, saving time and resources by not re-querying or re-computing. What’s not to love? Well, as with everything else in life, the devil’s in the details, and if you don’t get those right then anything can become a failure.

It’s “Function as a Service”, not “Functions Instead of a Service”

General Commentary, Programming No Responses »

May 312023

Like just about everybody else who runs software post dot-com bust, I read about Amazon Prime Video re-architecting their monitoring service, and saw all the microservices vs monolith hot takes. For the best monolith vs microservice analysis on the post, I recommend CodeOpinion’s video. What I found more interesting about the post wasn’t the monolith vs. microservice debate (I agree with CodeOpinion – that’s not really the relevant point to the original article), but rather the limits to using Functions as a Service (FaaS)…as a service.

The bigger picture to software

Programming No Responses »

Apr 302023

Working in software development, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking the code is everything, and everything must be in service to the code. After all, not only is the product or service we deliver code, but running on the cloud means your operations are now code, infrastructure is code..it seems like literally everything about software has been turned into “just code.” Software has eaten the world, after all, and yet, writing the code is still the least important part of the whole software development process. That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant, mind you – “least” is a relative term – but there’s so much more that goes into building and running a successful application or service than commands and semicolons.

Why are cross-functional teams so hard to build?

General Commentary, Programming No Responses »

Jan 312023

So after taking a brief break to write about Twitter, because that’s everyone’s new favorite hobby, I wanted to revisit part of my central thesis in my posts on platform engineering – that it’s hard to find places with actual cross-functional teams capable of doing everything needed to build and run an application or service from concept to being used in production. I’m not totally sure why this is something that organizations don’t want to do, but I still don’t platform engineering is the solution (or as I’m sure some companies will try to spin it, “compromise”). Continue reading »

Twitter the (breaking) news app

Java, Shenanigans No Responses »

Dec 122022

Elon Musk has tweeted extensively about Twitter and journalism, and what that can mean for the future. I know a lot of people like to complain about his approach to running Twitter, but I think there’s something to his ideas. I once thought that WikiTribune would be the bridge that leads to a new type journalism due to its wiki-style approach. I was clearly wrong, as WikiTribune lasted about 2 years and is now a social media site. Twitter, however, may be able to succeed where WikiTribune failed, assuming it can figure out a business model that keeps the servers on.

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

General Commentary, Programming No Responses »

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?

General Commentary, Programming, Shenanigans No Responses »

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?”

Why don’t we re-use services?

Programming, Projects No Responses »

Aug 312022

I’ve been thinking a decent bit about architecting services lately, and kept finding myself going to the topic of how useful it would be to make “general infrastructure” services (like an offline job processor, or gateway for capturing client events from your web application) shared resources versus making teams deploy and manage their own instances of those services in the broader context of their own work. Re-using existing services has a lot of appeal, but it’s really something that needs specific conditions to succeed. That said, advances in cloud provider functionality would have made implementing a lot of services easier, and my general approach to building applications has changed as a result. Continue reading »

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