The general trend in software development appears to be toward generalization over specialization. I'm not sure this is a good thing.
Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
191–200 of 424 posts
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#192As a grumpy evil sysadmin, I think the good Professor misses where the real disconnect is, at least nowadays: stack management. Why do things like Docker exist? Because developers got tired of sysadmins saying "sorry, you can't upgrade Ruby in the middle of this project". Why does virtualenv exist? A similar reason. Containerized ecosystems (which is to say basically all of them now) are really a sign of those of us…
That might be a bit naive, but isn't that more of a package management Problem than everything else? I can tell you that while I know this issue I also know that on systems like Alpine Linux or FreeBSD this is less of a problem than it used to be and containers (so virtualization - even when it is OS-level) is potentially overkill and certainly not a solution. virtualenv and others seem way saner in this case.
For development as a whole it is really great though in my opinion.
Or you simply use something like this: https://bazel.build/
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#193As a grumpy evil sysadmin, I think the good Professor misses where the real disconnect is, at least nowadays: stack management. Why do things like Docker exist? Because developers got tired of sysadmins saying "sorry, you can't upgrade Ruby in the middle of this project". Why does virtualenv exist? A similar reason. Containerized ecosystems (which is to say basically all of them now) are really a sign of those of us…
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Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#194I think the reverse is much more true, but maybe nobody argues about that anyway.
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>> The worst sysadmins get in the way of developers. Ones that scale down your CI server to the cheapest, throttled, one the hosting company has, leaving $800/day contract developers waiting for builds that run in 20 seconds on their laptops take nearly an hour. How likely is that the sysadmins were told to 'just make it run cheaper, I don't care' by someone higher in the foodchain?
How likely is that the sysadmins were told to 'just make it run cheaper, I don't care' by someone higher in the foodchain? If you're blindly following "orders" to reduce costs and doing things that push up costs elsewhere then you're not doing a good job. A good sysadmin (or the sysadmin's boss) should be able to pull up some numbers and say "Build tasks are being queued for an hour before they run. What impact is th…
>If you're blindly following "orders" to reduce costs and doing things that push up costs elsewhere then you're not doing a good job.
This is the responsibility of someone above to know whether or not the orders they give should be given. If they need to ask for information from people below them, fantastic, please help them along.
Please don't fall on the sword for incompetent managers.
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#196Should sysadmins have software development experience (e.g. DevOps)? For what values should 'X have Y experience?' Should we go as far as... "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new proble…
It's pretty much impossible to be a sysadmin without writing some software, though I acknowledge we sysadmins have a tendency to use duct tape (there's a reason Perl is the sysadmin language) rather than a more solid adhesive. But whereas I've met tons of developers who have never maintained an installed system, I've never met a sysadmin who has not written a good deal of code.
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
The time I'm thinking of was a team that wanted to switch from Rails 1.2 to 2.0 along with whichever interpreter bump was required to make that happen (IIRC 1.8.5 to 1.8.6, but this was a decade ago; I'm pretty sure 1.9 hadn't come out yet). Halfway through a project.
Unreal. Yep, that sounds like that 'long time ago' I was talking about. Nowadays you can do that, no sysadmin to tell you not to, but nobody bothers.
DevOps here - yes, they do bother. Pinned set of dependencies, but one of them updates? Upgrade all of the dependencies. But don't worry, it's all in a Docker container (I have a completely separate rant about Docker's compatibility ignorant hummingbird).
Ironically enough, I think the current DevOps culture emerged partially because sysadmins got tired of saying no (if only so they could sleep through the night), so now they let developers tie their own nooses so they can be woken up at night.
It's wonderful to give up all of those software pages back to developers. And the developers do seem motivated to fix the bugs which wake them up at 3am, so it turns into a win all around. It's still hard to watch a new team come up to speed though, knowing how little sleep they will be getting over the next month because they made their new docker program stateful...
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#198As a grumpy evil sysadmin, I think the good Professor misses where the real disconnect is, at least nowadays: stack management. Why do things like Docker exist? Because developers got tired of sysadmins saying "sorry, you can't upgrade Ruby in the middle of this project". Why does virtualenv exist? A similar reason. Containerized ecosystems (which is to say basically all of them now) are really a sign of those of us…
> Why does virtualenv exist? A similar reason.
The reason why virtualenv exists is because different apps may have conflicting requirements, and you have apps that need to be deployed in different environments with different versions of different libraries. I know that even if I were developing against versions of libraries in system packages, I'd still end up having to use virtualenv in development (EDIT: I wrote 'production' here by accident) because my stuff gets deployed on different versions of Debian and RHEL, necessitating virtual environments if only so that I can make my development environment as close to production as possible.
> In the year 2015, pip went from version 1.5.6 to 8.1.1 (!) through 24 version bumps, introducing thirteen (documented) backwards incompatibilities.
Much of that has been down to efforts in recent years to finally fix the major issues with Python packaging. It has settled down quite a bit. Also, the 1.* to 8.* change is because the initial '1' was dropped: 8.* is essentially 1.8.* in the old versioning scheme.
I'm not saying that this couldn't have been handled better, but it's not just a 'hummingbirds off of their ritalin' situation: Python spent many years with packaging stagnated, and what you're seeing is rapid development to fix the mess that years of PJE-related neglect caused.
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've done the dual sysadmin/developer thing for a small company, and the problem I experienced there was completely incompatible working modes. Sysadmins must deal with interrupts (requests, crises, things driven by external schedules etc) and then in the rest of their time build systems to manage or reduce the interrupts. Developers are expected to produce work on a predictable schedule. This is disrupted by interru…
AMEN!!! In my current job, I am wearing both hats, and while I like that there is a certain variety in my work, users calling for help is highly disruptive when programming or doing some other stuff that requires deep focus. The upside that in a three-person IT department there is very little bureaucracy to fight, just the odd "organically grown" legacy system.
As an aside, did you know that the word "Amen" actually is a acronym in the Jewish language that means "El melekh neʾeman" (or AMN) which translates to "God, trustworthy King". (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen)
I figured the etymology of that word was rather interesting. But yeah, I get the whole SysAd/Dev dual job. They're tough to balance and do effectively. SysAds are firefighters. When the nag(ios) alarm rings, we come a-callin.
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#200As a grumpy evil sysadmin, I think the good Professor misses where the real disconnect is, at least nowadays: stack management. Why do things like Docker exist? Because developers got tired of sysadmins saying "sorry, you can't upgrade Ruby in the middle of this project". Why does virtualenv exist? A similar reason. Containerized ecosystems (which is to say basically all of them now) are really a sign of those of us…
As a Sys Admin turned Automation/Tools Engineer, I think you're missing part of the point. You've got the beginning of it right in saying that Sys Admins used to be involved in pinning down versions, and even in why that was necessary, but I believe you're incorrect in saying that the containerization technologies are bad for removing that.
Those technologies don't exist so Developers can get around Sys Admins and ignore your helpful advice. They exist to solve that problem that makes the Sys Admins role there necessary. It removes the underlying need for a Sys Admin to worry about the versions. Admins should see this as a good thing, but in my experience many dislike it because it takes them out of their Gatekeeper role. We shouldn't WANT to stop the Developers from from having the newest version of things. They aren't kids playing with toys that we need to nanny over, they're doing work that creates values and the fewer things we do to get in the way of that, the better.
If something breaks due to version changes, their testing should catch it. If things are breaking in production, we ought to get involved because there's some other problem, but before that we, as a profession, need to learn to get out of the way and let people work by letting technology handle the problems. The "Gatekeeper" mentality needs to die as quickly as it possibly can.