171–180 of 839 posts
"Nothing is ever personal." The way people treat you, has nothing to do with you. They are just living out their own stories. Related idea: "You train others how to treat you." Think reinforcement learning as applied to training a dog. (And I love dogs, have the deepest respect for them). The concept isn't that different when applied to our social interactions.
"No one on his deathbed ever said, I wish I had spent more time at the office." - Paul Tsongas
>I have only one regret … that I have not worked harder.
>Deathbed assertion, as quoted in Outlook Business, Vol. 3, No. 4 (23 February 2008)
"You can use your laptop power brick as a foot warmer." Not quite so grand as some ideas here, but still... my feet are warm.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" More and more, I'm realizing this applies more broadly than just for code. Abstraction is a form of optimization and shouldn't be done before the space has been properly explored to know what abstractions should be built. Standardization is a form of optimization and shouldn't be proposed until there's a body of evidence to support what's being standardized. Failure to…
Hence my issues with micro services and Kubernetes/containerisation (by default.)
I've always hated the fact people simply jump onto these technologies and methodologies as if they're automatically the right solution because everyone is talking about them. What they don't understand is that they're optimisations.
You build a monolith and put it on one machine to begin with. No load balancer. Just a single EC2 instance with snapshots. As the customer count grows and demand increasing you scale it out...
Now you're on two EC2 instances and might want to consider using RDS. You have an ALB and you're using ACM to offload TLS certificate management. More customers come along and the monolith begins to slow down, so you optimise the application this time...
Now you have the most successful/popular parts of your application split out into separate components but still using the same database. You're still just running Docker on a few EC2 instances though. You don't need orchestration yet. But now your customers start demanding more features and changes on a more frequent basis. Also your customer count is rising more and more. You're now ready to scale out and re-architect things again...
Now you've got 80-85% of your monolith split out into separate components, in Docker images, and you're using Kubernetes to orchestrate the whole thing because you need to iterate and deploy parts of the software on a near daily basis.
Taking it slow and keeping things simple in the beginning allows you to focus (from a systems perspective) on stability and security, which are much easier when you have a monolith and two EC2 instances. As you need to iterate faster and more often you increase the complexity of the network to meet the needs of the development team. It becomes much harder to secure and manage, but the trade off is worth it.
That's how you optimise your infrastructure over time.
The only situation in which I would contradict my self on this point is if you're developing a product that you know will need micro services and K8s to begin with AND everyone on the team has extensive experience implementing an application in that manner.
Nick Cave, on writer's block: "My advice to you is to change your basic relationship to songwriting. You are not the ‘Great Creator’ of your songs, you are simply their servant, and the songs will come to you when you have adequately prepared yourself to receive them. They are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of you, unable to get in." https://www.theredhandfiles.com/do-u-have-any-spare-lyr…
This reminds me of Sam Harris's guided meditation app. One of the common questions raised in the guided meditations is whether or not you can observe the part of your mind that is generating your thoughts. His suggestion is that you can't--the thoughts come into consciousness on their own; you can observe the thoughts as they come and go, but you can't observe where thoughts come from. Like the sensation of breathing…
"Homo Economicus": that we all act out of rational self-interest, subject to mental and physical constraints (though few are conscious of the reasons they act as they do).
That's why the (global) economy can exist and function as it does: the desire for things.
Keeps me on task.
Ignorance can be bliss. Didn't change my life, but has definitely helped me in a lot of cases, especially recent times. Generally speaking, I can't affect what is currently happening in the news, despite how upsetting it might be, and it won't even affect me in a lot of cases. I try to consume little information for things I don't care about or will have a negative effect on me as a way to spare myself from anxiety.…
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/style/the-man-who-knew-to...