Scubabear68 (u/Scubabear68)

Scubabear68 commented on How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users blog.algomaster.io/p/scal... · Posted by u/olayiwoladekoya

steveBK123 · 7 days ago

Unfortunately that message was way way behind the bombast of "microservices everywhere now" that preceded it for years, to the detriment of many small orgs.

I've seen engineering orgs of 10-50 launch headlong into microservices to poor results. No exaggeration to say many places ended up with more repos & services than developers to manage them.

Scubabear68 · 7 days ago

The worst I ever saw was an engineer misunderstood microservices, and made a service per endpoint.

He started complaining to management that 50 CI/CD setups was his limit he could support.

He was absolutely amazed when I showed him he could combine endpoints into a larger logical service. 50 services became three, and it’s still three a few years later now.

Scubabear68 commented on The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala scala-lang.org/blog/2026/... · Posted by u/bishabosha

ecshafer · 10 days ago

Scala isn't as hot as it used to be. I think the rough Scala 2->3 transition, coupled with improvements in the base Java language, emergence of Kotlin + Android support, and popularity of Python in data science and data pipelines (lets just do everything in one language became popular) kind of made Scala not quite as popular as it could have been. Plus the long compile times are a pain. However it seems to have a really high coolness ratio for a language. The few jobs I do see in Scala are very cool looking. Very few boring looking jobs.

Scubabear68 · 10 days ago

You got it. Scala had a shot being an early mover in the JVM functional programming space, but they really shot themselves in the foot with their version transition problems and tooling issues you allude to. Java is probably "good enough" for most shops now, and if you are not bound to the JVM I really don't understand why you would go with Scala today.

Scubabear68 commented on Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager jampa.dev/p/lessons-learn... · Posted by u/jampa

crjohns648 · 13 days ago

> A good manager is more like a transparent umbrella. They protect the team from unnecessary stress and pressure, but don’t hide reality from them.

I'm absolutely going to steal this metaphor going forward.

Being a "transparent umbrella" does require knowing the personalities of your reports, some people do get distracted when they think higher-up decisions or unhappiness are going to affect their team. Most people, however, really appreciate the transparency. It helps them feel more in control when they know what is happening around them, and when things do change they can tie it back to something that was said previously.

Scubabear68 · 13 days ago

> They protect the team from unnecessary stress and pressure, but don’t hide reality from them.

I was going to highlight this as well, but it is also one of the trickiest parts of the equation, because by definition this inevitably involves a lot of politics and social implications.

What I have learned over the years: let the overall direction, and also the overall competitive pressures, filter down through your umbrella. But shield them from the details and your specific efforts here, unless it is relevant.

Maybe even more important, though - recognize inflection points in your company and your group. How you manage during routine times and during stressful times may well be very different. If they're not, then you have a serious problem.

Scubabear68 commented on Verizon outages reported across U.S. firstcoastnews.com/articl... · Posted by u/Scubabear68

_nickwhite · 25 days ago

Anyone still using SMS for 2FA codes, here is your official notice to change that ASAP.

Scubabear68 · 25 days ago

I get the sentiment, but at least for me at home, iOS iMessage still works fine with Wifi. So it's not impacted, and in fact I had to relogin to a client machine with a very persnickety 2FA and it had no issues.

Scubabear68 commented on Verizon outages reported across U.S. firstcoastnews.com/articl... · Posted by u/Scubabear68

Meekro · 25 days ago

My wife and I are on the same Verizon family plan. One of us can be down while the other is fine, then 30 minutes later it's the opposite. It's been like that all day.

Scubabear68 · 25 days ago

Same here, except that when here (central-western NJ) when someone "recovers" here we go from SOS to a few bars but no LTE or 5G indicator. Yikes.

Scubabear68 commented on Verizon outages reported across U.S. firstcoastnews.com/articl... · Posted by u/Scubabear68

Scubabear68 · 25 days ago

Our Comcast DNS keeps going in and out too, not clear if it is related or knock on effect or something else entirely.

Scubabear68 commented on Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home buckscountybeacon.com/202... · Posted by u/mooreds

Scubabear68 · a month ago

In my experience, local reporting has stagnated so badly that they now survive by kissing up to whoever is in power. The majority of pieces are puff pieces commissioned by the subject or friend of the subject, be it a school superintendent or local town council or what have you.

And yes, the bias is heavily to the left. I am very centrist in my views so a left or right leaning bias would be upsetting.

We live across the river from Bucks County PA in NJ, Bucks County journalism and the NJ equivalent are just shills.

Scubabear68 commented on Microsoft May Have Created the Slowest Windows in 25 Years with Windows 11 eteknix.com/microsoft-may... · Posted by u/nabla9

api · a month ago

The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.

Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else.

The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third.

This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it.

Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena.

It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.

Scubabear68 · a month ago

> The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs

Funny. Back in the 90s Microsoft just hired kind of random kids from college to write their OS in C.

Scubabear68 commented on I charged $18k for a Static HTML Page (2019) idiallo.com/blog/18000-do... · Posted by u/caminanteblanco

altacc · a month ago

The inefficiency of large companies is widespread. In many there are layers of managers whose jobs are little more than to attend meetings with each other and tickle down the bare minimum of requirements to delivery teams. So it's no surprise that they can be willingly blind to the inefficiency of the process that guarantees their job.

My story of being paid to do nothing involves spending a month waiting for my own PC and login details at a large corp, being billed at $1200+ a day. It was mind-numbing and demotivating and I soon left.

Hopefully these experiences made me a better manager when I started hiring contractors. I always had a computer & user account ready, scripted any local environments needed and work lined up, plus never asking them to start first thing in the morning due to my experience of waiting around in a new office whilst waiting for everybody I needed to arrive and have their first coffee. Just because somebody is a temporary contractor doesn't mean you can't show them some respect for their time & profession.

Scubabear68 · a month ago

My record is about 9 weeks to get onboarded enough to do work, where "onboarded" was getting my Laptop to work and login and access to a few critical systems.

These kinds of costs are baked into every level of the company. This is a place where they calculate it costs about $30,000 to add a period to the end of a sentence in a static website.