readlikeasloth

Say what you want about European financial organizations but they are legally obliged to practice their recovery strategies. So every other month production clusters with all user data get teared down in one cloud region and set up in another one over night. This works surprisingly well. I guess they would never do that without the legal requirements.

... but then you have two competing organizations: OLD versus NEW. This is how it plays out: NEW starts as your shiny, agile, start-up-ish org with all the young people with the latest ideas. A company nearby got rid of all their freelancers? Great, let´s hire all of them. Think big. Great meetings and people seem to really make progress happen. We´re getting rid of all the REST APIs and introduce Apache Kafka as a message bus for the company. Only then progress stalls and OLD slowly begins to crawl back in. Legal department audits the agile process and unfortunately German laws are quite tough on bogus self-employment. All the freelancers have to go and NEW loses all their expertise. Other employees follow as this whole thing does not pay that great and looks more and more like any other 9/5 job. Fast forward, 5 years later: the startup spirit is long gone. Corporate culture at NEW mirrors OLD. And not only culture wise. The NEW, "-tech" company is not seen as an independent company any more but supposed to be merged with the parent company. Because why have two of the same, right? Meanwhile OLD made some progress and introduced some reform projects. So developers do not have to fill out a printed paper application to get new servers any more. Only now you have two Kafka clusters with completely different setups as OLD also started their one one at some point.

My learning here: new is not new if the culture stays the same. Also: never underestimate the power of old. People always talk about the new, shiny stuff. But old was there first. And is much more resilient than it seems.

Same here. Tried to connect an old Midiman Midi interface to a recent MacOs. Oh boy. Someone built a driver and I´m grateful for that but it was quite something to get the thing working. It seemed to me a waste to buy a new piece of hardware for some antique technology like Midi, just because the driver of the old interface was not working any more. I don´t mind dealing with pain caused by computers in my day job. But in my free time as a musician all those technological hassles are a hindrance of creativity.

Last time I checked programming had something to do with computer science. You could say its applied computer science. So I ask myself: how come that this discipline, already 50+ years old, has almost no consensus of how its output aka written code should be structured? Why are there no established standards or rules? Not a rethorical question, happy to hear your thoughts.

This begs the question: what do you recommend instead?

Ah. Sweet memories of a legendary Steve Ballmer moment: https://youtu.be/eywi0h_Y5_U

> If you're 100% serverless then this doesn't really apply, but if you're spinning up eight different Kubernetes clusters for eight different teams then you probably need to collaborate a bit better.

This is exactly the situation I´m currently in. Company decided to migrate from big on-prem kubernetes to AWS. Now every team got their own account and well... good luck, you´re on your own now. We´re a small team of three developers. Although we have three certifications under our belts (AWS Dev, CKA, CKAD) it took us almost three months to configure AWS and set up the Terraform pipeline and define processes like "upgrading cluster". The "enabling" part was basically missing in the whole cloud strategy of the company. It was more like: good luck, you´re on your own now.

In fact we made contact with a neighboring team. Only to find out that their use case was so different from ours that collaboration didn´t make any sense. For them Kubernetes was not a good fit, for us it was the way to go.

Speaking of sharing a cluster or AWS ressources: we figured out that it is not allowed due to billing reasons. Company policy is: One product per AWS account.

If you ask me I see a shift of paradigms happening here. Now you hear a lot about "enabling teams" instead a dedicated team for infrastructure providing services (e.g. the Kubernetes podcast from Google). I´m not convinced yet. I think this is more like kicking down responsibility down the chain. And then it feels more like: Someone needs to do the dirty work but nobody wants to do it.

It might work if you don´t have to provide Service-level agreements (in our case: we don´t). For us it is just more work to do. And our work shifts from dev to ops. Instead of writing software we´re mostly busy with configuring cloud resources. This will ease a bit once everything is running. However: I see this whole change more as ... uh, strong word... ideologically motivated. Cui bono? Neither our team, nor our users nor our infrastructure bill.

I don't want to spill the beans here, and well: you figured it already out by yourself.

You are joking but this place exists, in California in the middle between SF and L.A. and spent 5 months there. Didn‘t write an article about it though.

Why does it have to be the CEO? My first association was that Winston Wolfe character from Pulp Fiction. Wouldn´t it be neat if companies had that kind of fixer who you could call for the real hard problems? Like problems that arise from the structure of the organization and cannot be fixed on a micro level. Asking half joking, half serious.

Out of curiosity: what features from Ruby are they reimplenting? I have no experience in Ruby but in a few other languages and framworks. And having encountered something missing yet when writing Go web services.

> I do realize that this no-tech-interview approach would probably never work for permanent positions

This. Booking a freelancer is a completely different game than hiring an employee. There are legal aspects here because big company A hires small service provider company B aka freelancer to do work. In my experience companies looking for freelancers need experts with very specialized skills on framework X or cloud provider Y.

> I can imagine Go shining a lot more brightly when working with a team which has mixed skill levels.

Thank you for expressing that thought. However: I came quite to the opposite conclusion. I´m currently working in a small team with members that are not so versatile in coding, coming from a JavaScript background. It has been surprisingly easy to teach them Spring Boot. You follow a typical layout and everything falls into its place. I have my reservation that the same holds true for Go. It feels like there is much more room for confusion. Do I use global functions or receivers? How do I inject my dependencies and where do manage them? How do I build constructors and do I really need them? I found surprisingly little advice on those topics.

Just did the other way last month from jekyll -> hugo after years on jekyll. Compile times down from 30 seconds to 300ms. Also was not able to reinstall jekyll with lots of ruby related errors and my knowledge of ruby is close to zero.

I think you just described the Keynesian beauty contest: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

Warren Buffet stories are like Chuck Norris jokes. Buffet does this, Buffet does that. Oh well.

I just see a pattern in that story: Save your precious time. Use your resources in a better way. Be more efficent. Amass more resources (that could be personal fitness or wealth as well). Here the resource is knowledge. And they finally turned the quiet nerd realm of reading books in solitude into competition and sports.

Wondering what you do after year two when having read 400 books. Will you be able to recite what was in book number 42? And then what? You start a discussion with your coworkers about Plato or some obscure sociological theories? You could do that but this might not go anywhere (speaking of personal experience here).

I guess the idea is to speed read your way through as fast as possible to get the numbers right. So you can simply throw in some quotes like the article did with Orhan Pamuk. Why not ambling a bit and enjoying books instead?