The fading art of SQL, and also your ORM is out to get you
Title partially stolen from Renegade Otter’s brilliant critique YOUR DATABASE SKILLS ARE NOT ‘GOOD TO HAVE’ In the past few years I have been noticing an unsettling trend – software engineers are eager to use exotic “planet-scale” databases for pretty rudimentary problems, while at the same time not having a good grasp of the very…
“There is nothing wrong with a monolith”
Renegade Otter serves up an entire buffet of charbroiled sacred cows in Death by a Thousand Microservices. If you need to actually deliver a working software product, it is a masterclass in avoiding the Silicon valley cargo cult of needless complexity. It hits all the major rules of the ‘Lair and then some, its like…
Every bug you fix creates two more – Azure fire edition
A recent Azure DevOps outage highlights a number of ways well-meaning engineers shoot themselves in the foot. BackgroundAzure DevOps engineers sometimes need to take a point-in-time snapshot of a production database to investigate customer escalations or evaluate potential performance improvements. To ensure these snapshot databases get cleaned up, a background job runs every day and…
Maybe source code rusts after all…
I’ve said it before, the biggest part of my job is just telling developers they can’t rewrite something. From the recommended reading list, Joel Spolsky lays down this timeless advice all the way back in 2000: rewriting from scratch is the single worst strategic mistake any software company can make. He cites how Netscape (browser)…
Even cloud providers can’t afford to run in the cloud at scale
“The move from a distributed microservices architecture to a monolith application helped achieve higher scale, resilience, and reduce costs” – Prime Video Tech Blog A surprisingly forthright statement on the cost of cloud computing and the frenzied drive to microservice all the things, from Amazon no less. The headline really says it all, but let’s…
Alexa, what’s the most all-out-of-fucks thing a developer would say at the end of a Friday before a 3 day weekend?
Happy Presidents Day everybody.
If your “hack” has been running in production for years, was it really a hack?
I can’t tell if developers are idealistic pessimists or pessimistic idealists. The most common manifestation of this paradox? Apologizing for delivering working software. The idea that one could have done a better job if only they had more time is admirable, even tragic sometimes, but should we really be so hard on ourselves? Useless Dev…
To Scale! The cause of, and solution to, all of (startup) life’s problems
Jason Cole slices off a steaming slab of ribeye from my favorite startup false idol – the obsession with scale. The moment that you create a solution, whether it’s a piece of software or a business process, you start to feel pressure to optimize it…this urge to prematurely scale is almost entirely fear-based, a fear…
UI Fails # 8 – Get This App to Urgent Care
Checking my place in line at the urgent care clinic: The only thing more broken than my son’s arm is this markup.
Never miss a pull request with this one easy trick!
Like all high-functioning dev teams with a modicum of self-awareness, we thrive on gallows humor and existential dread. No wonder we’ve adopted the this is fine dog for our mascot. I was searching for the original image source when, to my immense surprise and delight: A This Is Fine dumpster fire vinyl figure that I…
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The Lair of Leaky Abstractions 