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rckrdon Bell-Curve Opinions on Engineering

A few startups have tried to bring the reactivity of spreadsheets to notebook-style development -- Hex for python and Observable for JS.

rckrdon Bell-Curve Opinions on Engineering

Beginners may try to optimize some things, but by fact of their newness, don't even understand the extent to which they can optimize.

Think of the futility of ex-FAANG engineers who try to implement similar technology (e.g., reproducible and declarative build systems) at a 10-person startup.

rckrdon Ask HN: Where do you post your writing?

Owning your own domain and content is important. I run my blog on Ghost. Substack is nice (and you can pay $50 to add your own domain), but my business model (i.e., free content and no business model) doesn't align with theirs.

[0] https://matt-rickard.com/

rckrdon The Story of Heroku

Guessing this is a response to the article I wrote that showed up on HN last week "Why Did Heroku Fail" [0]

I'm glad the author touched upon some of the outsized contributions Heroku made to DevOps and infra. I don't think many will argue with that. I was actually thinking of Vercel when I wrote the piece. What does a PaaS need to look like in 2022 to succeed? The author briefly mentions the current state of Heroku -- I think we all will also agree they deserved to capture more of the value that they created. The bigger question (in my mind) is how?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372675

rckrdon Minikube quickly sets up a local Kubernetes cluster on macOS, Linux, and Windows

That was my post. I'm one of the ex-maintainers of minikube and skaffold as well.

[0] https://matt-rickard.com/docker-desktop-alternatives/

rckrdon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://matt-rickard.com/archive/

My personal blog with 327 posts. I write daily posts about engineering/startups/and other topics I find interesting (math, cryptography, behavioral psychology, etc.)

rckrdon Docker for Mac Without Docker Desktop

kind (Kubernetes-in-Docker) still requires Docker, so its not a replacement for Docker Desktop (Windows/macOS). You'll need to run kind in minikube or kind in Docker Desktop.

rckrdon Docker for Mac Without Docker Desktop

One of the past maintainers of minikube here. Minikube, while targeted towards Kubernetes developers, also provides all the features you'd want here. It also takes away most of the pain from virtual machine management w/ native hypervisors.

If you're looking for customizability (boot image, docker version, container runtime), minikube is probably your best bet. It even comes with some rudimentary file-sharing and port-forwarding primitives, but it isn't as batteries-included as Docker desktop. On the other hand, you have full ssh access to the VM to do whatever you want (+startup scripts, etc.)

Awhile back, I wrote up a comparison of all the Docker Desktop Alternatives. [1]

[1] https://matt-rickard.com/docker-desktop-alternatives/

rckrdon AWS is not a dumb pipe

Author here. They missed the Snowflake opportunity by having the wrong architecture for Redshift (decoupled storage and compute). They shifted to the Snowflake model in 2019, but the damage might already be done. For other the other services I listed, the main differentiators are mainly plugins/extensibility and developer experience.

rckrdon Best Wordle guessing strategy

My contribution to the best-first guess on Wordle is a greedy algorithm that picks the word that eliminates the most solutions. [1]

[1] https://matt-rickard.com/wordle-whats-the-best-starting-word...

rckrdon Challenges of Resolving Merge Conflicts: A Mining and Survey Study [pdf]

I'm still surprised merge conflicts show up so often. At its core, diff and diff3 haven't changed since the 1980s. Complicated, heuristic-based algorithms that don't take into account the rich metadata and semantics we can understand today.

diff3 is not

- idempotent

- semantic

- stable (formally, stability means that there exists a constant such that for small enough changes there is a guaranteed small merge)

[1] https://matt-rickard.com/diff3-shortcomings/ [2] https://matt-rickard.com/diff-the-magic-behind-version-contr...

rckrdon Write More, but Shorter

This has been working for me. Before, I struggled to finish blog posts between working on other things. Now, for the last 100 days, I've been writing a short blog post every day.

rckrdon Different Types of Software Containers

Nitro is interesting, thanks for link.

Kata containers are essentially lightweight virtual machines. Obviously some differences but I'd bundle them in the category as Firecracker.

rckrdon An Overview of Docker Desktop Alternatives

It exposes the Docker socket so you can use the docker client with it. That’s the recommended configuration anyways.

rckrdon An Overview of Docker Desktop Alternatives

Author here. I agree. Even as a past maintainer of minikube, I still am a frequent user of Docker Desktop and would gladly pay for it

rckrdon An Overview of Docker Desktop Alternatives

Author here. Tilt is great.

After minikube I wrote skaffold, which is a closer alternative to docker compose for Kubernetes with file watching and automated rebuilds and syncs.

https://skaffold.dev

rckrdon An Overview of Docker Desktop Alternatives

It requires users to install multi pass. You can run any of these tools in a virtual machine

rckrdon An Overview of Docker Desktop Alternatives

Minikube was initially based on docker-machine. It’s the closest alternative to having just Docker on macOS or Windows

rckrdon An Overview of Docker Desktop Alternatives

This is essentially what minikube does with the virtual box driver

rckrdon Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

Yep. We all start from different starting positions. That makes a big difference early on (what school did this person go to? what have they already accomplished?) and less later on

rckrdon Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

Agreed. It wouldn't be so hard if things were linear.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

rckrdon Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

Two lines to represent the difference between (high slope, low intercept) and (low slope, high intercept)

rckrdon Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

I actually think the advice is aligned with that. Young candidates have high slope and low intercept. I don't think the aim of ambitious young developers is to move jobs and maximize pay, but rather to be in a role where they can continue to optimize for slope. That's the kind of company you want to build and the kind of developer you want to hire.

rckrdon Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

In my experience, the short run is always longer than we think, but the long run is always shorter than we think.

rckrdon Open MLOps – Open-Source Production Machine Learning

Have you looked at Kubeflow? https://www.kubeflow.org/

rckrdon A Practical Guide to Growing Your Open Source Project: Part 3 – Users

Thanks for the feedback. I agree, the reverse order probably makes more sense.

Distribution is difficult. I think that's more of a marketing issue than a technical one (although just as difficult). Will put that on the list for a future post.

It's usually project dependent, but finding users on Twitter who are having difficult with your project, or even taking some of the advice from Part 2 and being a plugin to a bigger ecosystem can capture users.

rckrdon Reflections on 10k Hours of Programming

Good point. If you're writing your own library, maybe. If you're writing business logic mostly, probably not. Thanks for the perspective.

rckrdon Reflections on 10k Hours of Programming

Domain Name System - As a developer working on Kubernetes. It's always DNS.

rckrdon Reflections on 10k Hours of Programming

Link should be fixed. It's https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.h...

rckrdon Tools to Run Kubernetes Locally

(1) Maturity of Kubernetes APIs. Fewer upstream changes.

(2) It's one of the main products of a venture-backed company. At Google, at the time, it was tough to get engineers on products like minikube.