231–240 of 299 posts
This story convinced me that I need some sort of legal document stating my desire to be euthanized if I ever reached this point. Ideally, I'd like to leave this world with an extremely high dose of a psychedelic drug. Not hooked up to machines in a hospital bed.
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Thank you for this post. It reminded me of the one line in “General Magic” where Marc Porat tells the documentary producer that the reason he agreed to make himself very available and open for the film was so that his (presumably somewhat estranged) children can get to know him and the story and the work they did, better. Terribly sorry for you and your friends and colleagues’ loss. Thank you and everyone else for do…
Had same reaction when I saw Marc in the General Magic doc. We’d already started working with Sandra when I saw it. But think it’s part of why Marc’s story was so emotional for me. Both stories of opportunity, genius, and loss.
Thanks again for your work, both on the company and the article.
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Working with stored procedures is just the pits. I wonder why you would describe that as "great". Maybe it's optimized, but so would be a giant executable written in assembly.
As long as you have the necessary tooling for source control, versioning, code search, etc. -- why is it the pits? I mean, if you stick to a rigorous procedure of automatically exporting your stored procedures to files and committing them to git with messages... how is that different from any other development? Serious question -- I've done tons of database work but only a little bit with stored procedures, so wonder…
"An elegant weapon, for a more civilised age..."
Sandra did a wonderful piece in capturing Lee, his family, his work, and his degeneration. Lee was a coworker and roommate of mine for years. Some additional info that might be of interest to this crowd: He was fantastic at video games (RTS and RPG) and chess. He had impeccable hand-eye coordination. He co-founded a gaming clan. None of that is relevant anymore. There is nothing to be done. His condition can't be sol…
One story that didn't make it the article: In September, after we'd released our S-1 but before Cloudflare's IPO, I took two weeks off and went back to my home town of Park City, Utah. (It's actually where Lee and I had been roommates many years before.) That two week period before you go public is known as the quiet period, so I was generally avoiding social media or answering my phone or doing anything other than r…
Cloudflare is a great platform, and I'm glad, thanks to Ms. Upson, I got to know one of the folks responsible for it a little bit. I'll be sure to keep chasing the hard problems in my own day-to-day code, and keep a thought for Lee while I do it.
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After reading this I had to do a quick self-assessment. For the last few years or so (I'm 33, also a software engineer) I've noticed a pretty big decline in my mental state. I can't focus. I immediately forget what I just looked at, read or did. I completely zone out when people talk to me. I am just not present in any situation. What is strange is that I can actually notice it, not in real-time however. It's been wo…
I'm 33 also. I'm starting to form a theory that it could be dopamine depletion. [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2791340/
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If God exists, they are cruel and uncaring.
The universe exists to give us the opportunity to be selfless caregivers for our fellow human beings or be callous or even predatory towards those we deem "other" or "lesser". This why we each are born with a sense of morality, however molded from culture to culture and manifest from person to person, except in the rare cases of people, like Lee, that have physical pathologies that hinder it. The non-pathological of…
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Working with stored procedures is just the pits. I wonder why you would describe that as "great". Maybe it's optimized, but so would be a giant executable written in assembly.
As long as you have the necessary tooling for source control, versioning, code search, etc. -- why is it the pits? I mean, if you stick to a rigorous procedure of automatically exporting your stored procedures to files and committing them to git with messages... how is that different from any other development? Serious question -- I've done tons of database work but only a little bit with stored procedures, so wonder…
1. Verbosity and fitness for purpose: while there is a kind of beauty in pure set-based SQL querying, stored procedures by their nature tend to be a procedural paradigm, and in my opinion, they are not particularly well suited to it. They are insanely verbose by today's standards, and doing anything typically requires several times more code than the equivalent in most modern languages (your mileage may vary with different database engines!). This results in large, monolithic SPs, which are difficult to read, understand, and test. The "standard library" is generally far less extensive than mainstream languages, leading to sub-standard, verbose, slow implementations (string concatenations and manipulations are a good example in MS SQL).
2. Code navigation, dependency management: the inverse of point 1 - in general, the tooling around databases for code searching, navigation, etc, is quite woeful in comparison to non database languages. In MS SQL, dependency management is so unreliable, that the official tooling misses several classes of dependencies, just depending on the type of syntax you happened to use. In your question, you start by saying that if you have the necessary tooling already obtained, it's all good. In my experience, rarely are even "barely good enough" tools in place, let alone anything close to what exists in other environments.
3. Unit testing: since databases tend to be stateful, the very concept of unit testing is a bit of an alien one. People don't tend to write SPs with unit tests in mind, and at least in the MS SQL world, the few "unit testing" frameworks that did exist tended to be incredibly painful to use - to the point that they were generally not worth it. Brittle, expensive integration tests are not the same.
4. Execution plan caching: the way databases handle caching of SP execution plans leaves much to be desired - generally the first set of parameters that an SP gets called with end up determining the execution plan for all future calls. Even in well managed code bases, this ends up being an issue, occasionally needing a DBA to manually go in, identify a misbehaving execution plan, and evict it. Vary by param, and no-cache options do not fully solve this. While the need for such mechanisms is obvious, it is surprising that these have been a pain for 20+ years. Now, execution plan caching also happens for normal SQL too, so my point is rather that the culture around SPs tends to have an unreasonable fear of dynamic SQL, which would be far more appropriate _where the query actually is of a dynamic nature!_
I can imagine people replying "but clearly, you're doing things that you shouldn't be - that's not what SPs are for!". And I agree, in a large part that is my point too. But then, what exactly should SPs be used for?
I've always wanted to work at Cloudflare because of Lee. He was probably the first one from my high school who actually made something that people want (and I also use everyday).
The behavior described in the article can be seen in all dementia patients. The article is written like it is a rare and unfortunate story which we watch from the sidelines, but only the age of Lee makes it unique. Many of us will experience exactly the same with a beloved one ( probably a parent, maybe a significant other). Every single part of the story except the age, all the changes in the behavior —small and lar…