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sourceless

436 karma · joined April 8, 2013

Director, SRE @ Kevel (kevel.com)

e: laurence@sourceless.org t: @sourceless g: github.com/Sourceless w: sourceless.org

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sourceless··on Slow deployment causes meetings (2015)
My reading was that there were two paths the author highlights:

1) Increase deployment capacity (which I'm reading as frequency, and I fully agree with)

2) Increase change capacity per deployment by making it less likely that a set of changes will fail through tests, monitoring, structural, and team changes

#2 is very much geared to "ship more changes in one deployment" which is where my disagreement lies. I think you should still do all those things, but that increasing the size of the bundle is explicitly an anti-goal.

I think you're better off, as a rule of thumb, making fewer changes per deployment if you want to reduce risk.

But -- that is my particular reading of it.

sourceless··on Slow deployment causes meetings (2015)
I think we may be violently agreeing - I certainly agree with everything you have said here.
sourceless··on Slow deployment causes meetings (2015)
That's indeed how I wrote it, but I could have worded it better. Very much agree that the insights in The Goal go far beyond the scope of The Phoenix Project.
sourceless··on Slow deployment causes meetings (2015)
I am disagreeing with the conclusion of the article, and asserting that more and smaller deployments are the better way to go.
sourceless··on Slow deployment causes meetings (2015)
I think unfortunately the conclusion here is a bit backwards; de-risking deployments by improving testing and organisational properties is important, but is not the only approach that works.

The author notes that there appears to be a fixed number of changes per deployment and that it is hard to increase - I think the 'Reversie Thinkie' here (as the author puts it) is actually to decrease the number of changes per deployment.

The reason those meetings exist is because of risk! The more changes in a deployment, the higher the risk that one of them is going to introduce a bug or operational issue. By deploying small changes often, you get deliver value much sooner and fail smaller.

Combine this with techniques such as canarying and gradual rollout, and you enter a world where deployments are no longer flipping a switch and either breaking or not breaking - you get to turn outages into degradations.

This approach is corroborated by the DORA research[0], and covered well in Accelerate[1]. It also features centrally in The Phoenix Project[2] and its spiritual ancestor, The Goal[3].

[0] https://dora.dev/

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Tech...

[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phoenix-Project-Helping-Business-An...

[3] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp...

sourceless··on Bad Emacs defaults
As someone with astigmatism, the glow on the text makes it near impossible to read.
sourceless··on A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics
Teaching maths without "Maths Language" is like teaching programming without a Programming Language.
sourceless··on Common Rifles Firing Same Ammo to Arm Finnish, Swedish Forces
This is, unfortunately, a misconception.

Sure, a bullet the same size or smaller will 'fit' in a given barrel, but a depending on its weight and dimensions it will, at best perform equally, and at worst destroy the barrel.

But a bullet isn't the whole story; the rest of the cartridge has to fit snugly for the action of the gun to lock properly. Again, best case - the gun doesn't fire. Worst case, the action blows up.

This is a pretty simplified overview, but unfortunately the assertion above is a (pretty absurd) myth. Sorry :(

sourceless··on Sharing Your Netflix Account
Second they enforce this, I'm unsubscribing
sourceless··on Yes, JavaScript Is a Lisp
It's not homoiconic, which makes it not a lisp for me.
sourceless··on Lincoln Cathedral
St Wulfram's in Grantham (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Wulfram%27s_Church,_Grantha...) is just a little shorter than St James, and still has its original chained library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Trigge_Chained_Library), which has been claimed to be the oldest public library in the UK!
sourceless··on Ask HN: Is it possible to have a structured work day in software dev?
Sounds like you are being overworked. A 9-5 as an Eng Manager is achievable, but you might need to jump ship to find it.

Working late has a huge knock-on effect on your social life and ability to interact with society around you. That's probably contributing to your burnout.

If there's budget or willingness, having someone in that timezone who can perform your role for that meeting may be possible.

I'd be very wary of taking any regular work outside of your contracted hours unless there is a lot of $$$$ involved and your relationships can survive it.

You might get some mileage out of a long vacation, or agressively pruning your work hours.

sourceless··on Vendor by Default (2021)
And you get to inherit all the vulnerabilities while sacrificing the ability to automatically/easily upgrade to a fixed version...
sourceless··on Six programming languages I’d like to see
I've been working on something like this (though written using CLojure & core.logic)!

I'm glad to see there's someone else out there who think's it's useful.

sourceless··on Relearning to Learn
Thanks for your comment - and agreed!

Last year I taught myself a good deal of category theory, and you're right, five minutes is not really enough to learn most things - but it is enough time to start an exercise - and those five minutes often turn into something longer!

sourceless··on What Is JSON Patch?
We used this to make updates to the NHS Patient Demographic Service (which stores names, addresses, contact information). The records are pretty detailed (FHIR) and there's a lot of business rules and deep nesting.

It worked really well, and our users had no problems making JSON Patch requests.

sourceless··on Wingman for Haskell
Fantastic. First time I saw something similar to this was Edwin Brady’s recent demo of Idris 2. It’s quite amazing just how much of a program can be machine-written when the types are strict enough.

I hope holes & case-splitting get into many more languages.

sourceless··on What will programming look like in 2020? (2012)
I don't know, some of that is at least starting to happen with Idris 2, though not in the exact way predicted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOtKD7ml0NU (Type Driven Development with Idris 2)

Short summary of linked video: when your type system is powerful enough you can restrict the set of possible implementations to the point that the compiler can make a decent guess as to what the program should be to satisfy the type signature.

sourceless··on Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%
It'll certainly be the jump point for me -- I'm even holding back a much needed hardware refresh until BattlEye is supported on linux.
sourceless··on A mundane use of dependent types
> having this kind of convenience let you be lazy about design

Or, conversely, this kind of correctness by construction allows you to focus on parts of the program that could suffer from non-trivial bugs

sourceless··on Equal Pay for Equal Work
Yep. Your average SV engineer might be able to afford a Tesla and still have plenty room to spare in their budget, but your average EU-based engineer doing the same job is never going to get anywhere close.
sourceless··on Pygame 2.0
Fantastic! Feels like it's been a dead project for so long, it's good to see it's properly back and fully modernized.
sourceless··on Show HN: Useful scripts and environment setup for coding in VPS
OP might want to look up NixOS, which would make this many times easier. Or consider setting up a pre-configured image.
sourceless··on Ask HN: Is it legal for US companies to hire remote non-US contractors?
It is, so the individual needs to be aware of what taxes apply to them - and especially if you're making bay area money, it's probably a good idea to have an accountant to make sure your tax returns are correct and efficient.
sourceless··on Ask HN: Is it legal for US companies to hire remote non-US contractors?
Yes, but make sure you know what your country's tax laws are. US companies can even hire foreign workers as employees, so long as the contract meets to requirements of each country's working laws (e.g. paid time off and minimum wage in the EU). In that case it's best to get an accountant that has done it before.
sourceless··on Bevy: A data-driven game engine and app framework built in Rust
This might be the killer app that finally gets me to use Rust. I've tried so many engine libs/frameworks in so many languages now, and none of them look nearly as complete and ergonomic as this.

I don't really want to have to write my own 3d renderer or ECS because the engine's one is bad or nonexistent... this really scratches an itch for me.

Clojure take note...

sourceless··on Markdig and Error-Free Programming in F#
There's nothing in here about error free programming that I can see, just some fairly basic static typing. Never mind the lack of templating and not treating HTML like the tree structure it is (wrt modifying image sources).
sourceless··on Valve announces Half-Life: Alyx with first and only tweet for account
It’s the name of the main female allied npc in the Half Life 2 series
sourceless··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2019)
AireLogic | Software/DevOps Engineers, Business Analysts, Automation Testers | Leeds (UK) | ONSITE | https://airelogic.com

Hiring for C# and Python developers, BAs, and automation testers.

We are a health tech consultancy that works with the NHS, PHE, and a number of other public and private healthcare organisations to deliver effective people-first solutions to healthcare problems. We only take on projects that we know will be good for healthcare.

We offer technical consulting (arch/enterprise), software/devops engineering services, and have a small suite of products. In the last year we have grown from about 10 perm employees to nearly 50!

If you are in university still, we have internships and grad programmes available as well!

Contact via airelogic.com/careers or if you have more questions you can contact me directly at laurence.pakenham-smith at airelogic.com.

sourceless··on Weighted blankets might ease insomnia and anxiety
I know it sounds rather ‘Wow thanks! I’m cured!’, but that’s the point — if you’ve stopped worrying about it, then you’ve dealt with one of the root problems. Anxiety is dumb like that and being able to chill out and realise that even though it is important, you shouldn’t spend too much mental energy on it.

It’s not an easy thing to do by any means, but it is the end goal, and a lot of people are unfamiliar with how to just let go.

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