I strongly agree with almost all of this except the last part about project managers - a good one is invaluable, an ok one can still be helpful. The majority probably are neither (and their ability to be good at managing projects depends a lot on other org functions - not necessarily within their control) but way better than 90%+ that the author suggests.
Readit Newsmattacular commented on Software development topics I've changed my mind on chriskiehl.com/article/th... · Posted by u/belter
mattacular commented on Ask HN: How to approach first days on a new job as a senior PM? · Posted by u/LifeIsBio
Interesting (but perhaps not surprising) none of the top comments mention meeting or learning how to work with the people who build, operate, and maintain the software product that they're managing.
Understanding the dynamic (ie. inherent tension) between engineering and product/business is a really important part of a software job no matter what your role is.
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mattacular commented on We're Leaving Kubernetes gitpod.io/blog/we-are-lea... · Posted by u/filiptronicek
> Trying to boot the full service on a single machine required every single developer in the company installing ~50ish microservices on their machine, for things to work correctly. Became totally intractable.
This is certainly one of the critical mistakes you did.
No developer needs to launch half of the company's services to work on a local deployment. That's crazy, and awfully short-sighted.
The only services a developer ever needs to launch locally are the ones that are being changed. Anything else they can consume straight out of a non-prod development environment. That's what non-prod environments are for. You launch your local service locally, you consume whatever you need to consume straight from a cloud environment, you test the contract with a local test set, and you deploy the service. That's it.
> I guess one can grumble about bad architecture all day but this had to be solved.
Yes, it needs to be solved. You need to launch your service locally while consuming dependencies deployed to any cloud environment. That's not a company problem. That's a problem plaguing that particular service, and one which is trivial to solve.
> Both FAANG companies I’ve worked at had remote dev environments that were built in house.
All FANG companies I personally know had indeed remote dev environments. They also had their own custom tool sets to deploy services locally, either in isolation or consuming dependencies deployed to the cloud.
This is not a FANG cargo cult problem. This is a problem you created for yourself out of short-sightedness and for thinking you're too smart for your own good. Newbies know very well they need to launch one service instance alone because that's what they are changing. Veterans know that too well. Why on earth would anyone believe it's reasonable to launch 50 services to do anything at all? Just launch the one service you're working on. That's it. If you believe something prevents you from doing that, that's the problem you need to fix. Simple. Crazy.
> You launch your local service locally, you consume whatever you need to consume straight from a cloud environment, you test the contract with a local test set, and you deploy the service. That's it.
If your services are mostly stateless and/or your development team is very small that can work. If not, you will quickly run into problems sharing the data. Making schema changes to the shared cloud services. Cleaning up dev/test/etc data that has accumulated, etc. Then you are back to thinking of provisioning isolated cloud environment per dev.
mattacular commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect
> The two sides negotiated until late Sunday. The sticking points in recent days were over whether they could get a “just cause” provision in their contract, which means workers can be terminated only for misconduct or another such reason; pay increases and pay equity; and return-to-office policies.
This seems like a LOT of issues that still need to be hammered out. It would be one thing if they were disagreeing about a number, but it sounds like the terms keep changing and nobody agrees on the nature of the work itself. It's not even clear that there's a preliminary contract ready for the NYTimes to sign.
Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull. But if this is just attention seeking without a serious contract, it seems egregiously risky on behalf of the union members too: there's not a clear button the Times can push on behalf of the union to end the strike immediately. The Times would either have to sign a blank check to the union now, or the union would have to agree to an IOU in exchange for a bunch of temporary concessions.
> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull
Hard disagree. They're exerting what little leverage they have. Also there's plenty of places to get reliable election coverage besides NYT so who cares?
Nope
mattacular commented on What excessive screen time does to the adult brain longevity.stanford.edu/li... · Posted by u/rzk
“One of the biggest issues with picking up the phone right away in the morning is that when you have an object close to your face, it’s registered as a threat,” says Loeffler. “You wouldn’t want to wake up and look a bear in the face every morning. On a physiological level, it’s the same thing.”
This is interesting to me. It does make some evolutionary sense but at the same time, i wake up every morning and look at my girlfriends face, hopefully that does not subconsciously trigger the same response.
That said, the "sky before screens" idea has been rummaging in my mind since i first heard about it https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/sky-before-screens-has-ma...
What if it's a nice bear
mattacular commented on Scaling Rails and Postgres to millions of users at Microsoft stepchange.work/blog/scal... · Posted by u/htormey
Postgres can be scaled vertically like Stackoverflow did. With cache on edge for popular reads if you absolutely must (but you most likely dont).
No need to microservice or sync read replicas even (unless you are making a game). No load balancers. Just up the RAM and CPU up to TB levels for heavy real world apps (99% of you wont ever run into this issue)
Seriously its so create scalable backend services with postgrest, rpc, triggers, v8, even queues now all in Postgres. You dont even need cloud. Even a mildly RAM'd VPS will do for most apps.
got rid of redis, kubernetes, rabbitmq, bunch of SaaS tools. I just do everything on Postgres and scale vertically.
One server. No serverless. No microservice or load handlers. It's sooo easy.
> Just up the RAM and CPU up to TB levels
not sure what CPU at TB levels means but hope your wallet scales better vertically
mattacular commented on The historical distinction between coder and programmer cacm.acm.org/opinion/the-... · Posted by u/yarapavan
There is definitely a difference between “someone who can write a working computer program in a language” and “someone who can design, maintain, communicate, document and own a part of a large software project.”
Whatever you decide to call these two things anyone who has onboarded a new grad/intern has observed this distinction because its a different skill set.
Those are often the same person, at different points in their career.
This is like complaining that HTTP or API isn't explained.