getrealyall

This was written by a company selling feature flag software. Use that information as thou wilt.

The solution is not to use feature flags. Or maybe have them expire. Oh, also, discipline the developers who do this.

There's that vaunted, cerebral HN discourse I've come to know and love.

I doubt the people engaging in this behavior have stopped to consider the commons and the tragedies thereof that this kind of aggregate behavior might induce. Just because it works, doesn't mean it's not stupid.

This is the endgame of rent-seeking and an abundance of (concentrated) capital, in a country that is largely comfortable letting everyone fend for themselves. Who needs to build cars when you can tickle Sam Altman's Markov chain generator for $45,000 a month? I mean, I don't blame anyone, and I need money as much as the next husk of a man, but I really wish hustle culture would stop permeating every last open space of our lives. I'm depressed about it, too, and I don't see it getting better any time soon.

Edit: clerical error.

Edit 2: added despair.

I was bullied fairly relentlessly in school. Not sure cameras would've helped (don't even remember if we had them in classrooms), especially the verbal stuff, but I also don't like the idea of always being watched. Honestly, I would rather have the administration be less afraid of lawsuits and covering its own ass with comfortable lies like zero tolerance. Being bullied and then having the vice principal tell you "they were only joking" was the ACTUAL travesty, not any lack of surveillance. Fix the broken authority figures before instituting the Panopticon.

I mean this genuinely: do you have anxiety? Because I do, and it can make it hard to handle uncertainty and the feeling of not having control. A big project, especially one with lots of things left to do, is the definition of uncertainty. So, instead of tackling the anxiety-inducing project work, you spend time trying to cope by erecting larger and larger edifices of organization. The problem is that this never actually helps, because rearranging Jira columns doesn't get code written. But it, briefly, makes you feel better, and can even feel like progress. It's a sort of avoidant mechanism. I have OCD, and one of my compulsions is counting. Anxiety is the actual problem, and counting is the maladaptive coping mechanism. It's possible that spending too much time on organization tools functions similarly.

If this affects other portions of your life, some mild therapy might not be a bad idea. Otherwise, you might consider trying a very lightweight system, like notes in a text file, but with very actionable goals and milestones. Start with your end result, and work backwards. What would it take to get to, say, a production web service? Then write TODOs as you break the chunks up. Crucially, tell yourself that you can totally do the work, and then do a small task. You know how to do the work, but it's easy to talk yourself out of it. And it won't always be easy, but so what? It's a personal project, the stakes are so low! And it's supposed to be fun anyway, not a chore. But you have to think about why you're worried so much about finding the perfect tool, because I think that's the root of the issue.

Caveat: not a psychologist, just someone who struggles with anxiety and a crippling inability to get things done. :) I hope this helps a bit.

Are these extremely large shops in some sort of pocket universe? Because I've been around the block enough to regularly experience Kubernetes's issues over and over again, and I'd say that the GP comment you're critiquing is actually right on the money. In my experience, people downplaying Kubernetes's drawbacks have either never been bitten by them, or make a lot of money by getting people to use Kubernetes.

Let's be clear: all of the YAML-cum-DSL K8s deployment options are terrible. It's still just templating with extra steps. But Kubernetes is, fundamentally, one big while(1) loop turning YAML into infrastructure, so, eventually, you have to target YAML. It's just unfortunate that we got to "spicy regexes with if statements" and then stopped, instead of using something more robust.

Not having DBAs, the people with the actual skills to run the databases you need, available when you need them, certainly sounds like a business staffing problem, and not an engineering problem. Why are inexperienced developers managing databases in the first place? Or is this something people think you can just wing and be okay?

It's okay, your managed Kubernetes provider also just happens to sell a managed database service! Isn't that convenient?

Like fail2ban. Nothing quite like the anxiety of almost locking yourself out of your own system because you mistyped a password one too many times. It's a delicate balance (although, for something like SSH, I wouldn't even bother, unless the traffic is measurable enough to cause issues. But then you're getting (D)DoS'd, and you probably have bigger problems).

That's fine, you can always use something like Perl or Python then. But at some point, it certainly seems like all people want to do is run shell commands, and a shell script is still the best way to do that.

It's because web developers actually just want a command runner, and not a tool originally designed specifically for selectively recompiling parts of C programs. Make still works for what make is good at, and that's not simply running `npm start`.

Make is not a command runner. That people are abusing it as such doesn't mean make needs to change, it means people need to use the right tool for the job. Shell scripts can do the exact same thing without the wonky syntax or attempted dependency resolution, so why not just write a shell script? Hell, even npm has script running functionality. Is that not sufficient?

Financialization and mediocre developers. I haven't worked with too many people I could actually trust to even emit logs correctly, let alone develop a tool to collect and aggregate them.

I've also been told, time and again, in no uncertain terms, to "buy as much as possible". We've reached the logical conclusion of SaaS-everything: every company just cobbles together expensive, overcomplicated computers from other expensive, overcomplicated computer providers, resulting in expensive, bloated systems that barely work.

And I bet a hang glider can't fly from New York to Paris, either! The nerve!

Recall that the poster said this was for a small startup. If you're Google, by all means, use Google logging tools. If you aren't, then solve the problem you have, not the problem your résumé needs.