Readit NewsI really dont think America will recover from this and while the world will suffer as a result, I think in the long term, things will work out. There will be some major suffering but thats the way the world works. WW2 happened, a lot of suffering then peace. We had peace for too long, people forgot about suffering and now look at the world. Thanks America, you played yourself and are now bringing the rest of the world down with you. Rather than focusing on the right things, you are being played to argue with each other.
[2]: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/markdown.html
MkDocs by itself is okay, but Material for MkDocs is life-changing:
https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/
If it does everything you need it to do, it'll make creating and editing sites much faster and with fewer opportunities to break things.
I think that's the crux of the matter? AWS seems to now have a reputation for ignoring issues that are easily observable by customers, and by the time any update shows up, it's way too late. Whether VPs make this decision or not is irrelevant. If this becomes a known pattern (and I think it has), then the system is broken.
disclaimer: I have very little skin in this game. We use S3 for some static assets, and with layers of caching on top, I think we are rarely affected by outages. I'm still curious to observe major cloud outages and how they are handled, and the HN reaction from people on both side of the fence.
I'd like to share my experience here. This outage definitely impacted my company. We make heavy use of autoscaling, we use AWS CodeArtifact for Python packages, and we recently adopted AWS Single Sign-On and EC2 Instance Connect.
So, you can guess what happened:
- No one could access the AWS Console.
- No one could access services authenticated with SAML.
- Very few CI/CD, training or data pipelines ran successfully.
- No one could install Python packages.
- No one could access their development VMs.
As you might imagine, we didn't do a whole lot that day.
With that said, this experience is unlikely to change our cloud strategy very much. In an ideal world, outages wouldn't happen, but the reason we use AWS and the cloud in general is so that, when they do happen, we aren't stuck holding the bag.
As others have said, these giant, complex systems are hard, and AWS resolved it in only a few hours! Far better to sit idle for a day rather than spend a few days scrambling, VP breathing down my neck, discovering that we have no disaster recovery mechanism, and we never practiced this, and hardware lead time is 3-5 weeks, and someone introduced a cyclical bootstrapping process, and and and...
Instead, I just took the morning off, trusted the situation would resolve itself, and it did. Can't complain. =P
I might be more unhappy if we had customer SLAs that were now broken, but if that was a concern, we probably should have invested in multi-region or even multi-cloud already. These things happen.
Python is awful for this stuff
It's never fun. It's never pleasant. But to be fair, if I have a CLI tool that needs a deployed SSH client, or Tensorflow, or SDL or Qt or something else, I'm not convinced packaging gets much easier no matter what language we're talking about. If your use case is simple, Python is easy enough to deploy, and Go is even easier. If you can't disable CGO or need a third party component, I imagine the fun is just getting started anyway.
As a counterpoint, awhile back, discovered that Golang had a minimum kernel version requirement. That pretty much eliminated it as a possibility for writing tools for legacy systems. Python was viable though, Bash moreso. :) Couldn't tell you if that was still a requirement for Go today.
But I still make time for writing by hand. I find it to be very valuable, because it forces me to think differently about things and sit with ideas longer. I also find journaling almost impossible to do on a computer but very accessible in a notebook.
Writing by hand is also portable and adaptable. You can write on paper, surfaces, and signs. You can write when there's no power. No subscription is required, it doesn't require firmware updates, and it never has connectivity problems.
I can understand why some people would be willing to say goodbye to handwriting, but it's a skill that I'm extremely grateful for and I would be very sad to see it disappear from the world.