271–280 of 320 posts
That's my tactic to blend-in in a engineering team and gain some respect / credibility. I try to find the most boring, utterly broken part, that nobody wants to touch... and I sink time into it. Once I made it somewhat usable, I document it.
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I think you can blame "agile thinking" for that and the general laziness in product planning which is so typical of the last 10 years. We went from recognising that requirements may change after planning to zero planning and telling developers what's the next priority for the day, day by day. This lack of planning and product definition is also what drives the lack of documentation, which is another big problem in 20…
I don't understand why software architect isn't a position in any of the new startup culture tech businesses. The advantage of having an older, very wise and very experienced engineer whose job it is to document, plan and understand all the moving parts of your project would have been invaluable instead of expecting all the engineers who are stressed about hitting deadlines and chasing down memory leaks to do that wo…
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> we want to move from AWS to GCP Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Why do you think GCP is worse than AWS? I've used GCP and found it quite easy to start with and the managed instances was a breeze to set up and deploy stuff. I've done it for only small businesses and they were happy with the results too and the easy to use console made things easier to navigate. Maybe the trouble with GCP comes with scale?
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This resonates with me deeply. I can barely get work done most of the time. My "solution" is to leave a company before people get too frustrated with me. Changing companies frequently nets me better pay and more promotions than my harder-working peers, but I haven't felt fulfilled by work in a long time. What do you tell these mentees? What would you tell someone a bit further along in their career who still has the…
I have a similar problem. What's weird for me is that I feel totally useless and undisciplined, but when I look back, I actually do accomplish important things. But if you watched me day to day, it is obvious I'm wasting a ton of time. Not just on work, but on myself as well. I don't mean "wasting" like relaxing and maybe sorting out a problem in my subconscious. I mean wasting . I seem to be doing better recently. W…
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> we want to move from AWS to GCP Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Why do you think GCP is worse than AWS? I've used GCP and found it quite easy to start with and the managed instances was a breeze to set up and deploy stuff. I've done it for only small businesses and they were happy with the results too and the easy to use console made things easier to navigate. Maybe the trouble with GCP comes with scale?
Total cloud spend was in 2 digit millions per year.
Many hundreds of k8s clusters, all using each providers k8s managed service.
My general high level take is this:
* AWS
Products mostly work quite well. Their UX is terrible and very inconsistent between products. But things mostly work, and their support is generally excellent, especially when you have a TAM (Technical Account Manager) who you can reach out to at any time. They will help you navigate any support issues, and ensure you get a quick resolution. But AWS stuff is generally very complex, overly complex in my opinion.
Also at scale API rate limits just kill you, and AWS continues to struggle to provide any real visibility into API rate limits. I'm told that large services internal to AWS have to work around this by building their own caching layer in front of any control plane APIs. Also the api limits are at the account boundary, so you have to start doing account sharding.
GCP:
Has better UX, more consistent experience. Much better visibility into limits and things like that. You still probably end up having to do project sharding at scale to work around limits. We continued to run into a lot of issues with GCPs load balancers blackholing traffic, and it was never really resolved. I think their support is generally worse than AWS. I've had substantially worse support experiences with GCP than AWS at 2 companies now. Mostly support not being particularly useful, and not resolving the issue. As a customer it feels like Google has struggled to adapt their culture to the needs of real enterprise customers. AWS has this much more figured out. But my GCP account teams have always been quite good.
Azure: The worst of all 3. Lots and lots of issues with their k8s service, low limits on the number of nodes you could deploy. k8s 1.18 supposedly fixed a lot. But their answer was always just that you have to upgrade. Their support engineers were frequently gave us actively bad advice that would have resulted in full customer outages if we'd followed it. The engineers on my team fortunately didn't listen and instead figured out how to fix issues themselves. Also frequently ran into various limits and you need to start thinking about subscription sharding.
Of the 3, I personally prefer using and interacting with GCP. But their support or is still certainly worse than AWS. That said, I always felt bad for our TAMs at AWS. It felt like a non-stop job where you had too be available at all hours to deal with unhappy customers. They usually gave us fantastic support, but I wonder at what personal cost.
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I used to be a big fan of Derren Brown when I was younger, and I do still like a lot of his work, but he readily admits to deceiving the audience, and the deception includes the explanations he gives for his techniques. The video you linked to was part of a longer show (The System) which gives an explanation for how this trick was done - he says they kept filming take after take, for 9hrs, until they finally got ten…
He wrote Tricks of the Mind and that was a great book. One piece that has stuck with me for ~15 years now is the 20 word series that I can recite forward or backward after spending 5 minutes visualizing them in a "linked list". For example, telephone - sausage - monkey. Vividly imagine dialing a payphone with a sausage. Next up, sausage monkey. Vividly, using all your senses imagine a monkey flinging sausages to the…
When I told a colleague about this years ago, he said that my approach seemed so much more complicated and/or difficult than his approach (IIRC it's called the Memory Palace?) of building a castle/cathedral / museum in your mind, and as you walk through it, you see a banana on the left, and then a monkey a little further down the hall, then a trombone on the right, etc. For me, that technique simply doesn't work, as much as I try.
I'm a junior SWE and doing maintenance or working with legacy software is a big no for me. I realized this is mainly because I can't see the value these jobs would bring to me so I can't motivate myself. I wonder, what is the motivation for working with these kinds of systems career-wise?
Your statement is indicative of a junior who is unwilling to learn about the system and to do grunt work, which directly translates to due diligence and bug avoidance once it's feature implementation time.
Do not underestimate the value in working in legacy code for learning how to do things, how to do them better, and how sometimes not following the hip technology fad or the more academic approach is the right thing to do.