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Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

earthly.dev

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Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#131

Post by mercora »

franzwong wrote: post #121

Start a new project with technologies you are familiar with. Try new technologies on projects you are familiar with. Don't start a new project with new technologies.

i would say try new technologies on problems you are familiar with and focus on the problem space itself otherwise. that is independent of if this is a new project or not. if my goal is to learn something new i try to find a project in a problem space i am very familiar with, where i know the pitfalls and rough edges that make things harder than they should be. this gives me a much better understanding of whatever that new technology is about and if i really want to buy into it...

i.e i learned some programming languages by implementing a simple binary Usenet reader/client. i know pretty well by now what it encompasses to build that thing why it is harder to do with some paradigms then others and immediately see value whenever something turns out to be more elegant then previously. and if the task gets unpleasant i can usually state if that is because of the task or the technology or in this case the language i am using....

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#133

Post by kqr »

austincheney wrote: post #75
bombcar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be a good X you must follow the rules. To be a great X you must have followed the rules so well as to learn why they’re there and when they should be broken. Works for almost any X - writer, programmer, driving, etc.

Most people agree with this. The actual challenge is to discern real rules from superficial bullshit. That is a level of criticality many people do not possess and some find hostile or disgusting.

Another challenge is that it's very easy to think you understand the rationale behind the rules well before you actually grok them.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#134

Post by lhorie »

sinsterizme wrote: post #120
lhorie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice article, very relatable to my experiences. Having been on both sides of these types of discussions, I have a few thoughts: Advice isn't always unconditionally uncontingent. An infra person saying that something should probably be done in some overly specific preachy "best practice" way is sometimes thinking of things that a product person may not. For example, maybe the data guy told you to use WebScaleDB becaus…

You have to tell us what you replaced Jenkins with!

Buildkite

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#135

Post by zimpenfish »

hedora wrote: post #48
zdragnar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I was struggling to develop features in overengineered hell, I commented to my friends what a breath of fresh air updating a personal site with scp was. They all gave sighs and shudders of disgust, but then again, they had normal programming jobs, so I suppose it seemed quite backwards to them.

Oh, but scp won’t update it atomically, so you should switch to a scheme that will. Then all you need to do is set cache policies correctly, coordinate with your CDN, and maybe do a staged rollout, just in case. /s Seriously though, rsync is your friend. :-)

> Seriously though, rsync is your friend. :-)

Even rsync might not be atomic enough for some situations[1] since it'll update files as it goes rather than in one huge transaction at the end.

[1] I worked on the World Cup 2006 site for Yahoo! and we had this issue - solved with 'rsync --link-dest' and swapping symlinks.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#136

Post by zimpenfish »

anw wrote: post #31

It's cathartic to read other people who have to go through this. I'm fighting red tape for my team as we build out a dashboard. Outlook is packed with 1–2 hour meetings for the next 3 months where so far I'm: * being asked to load test our system to make sure it can handle the load (of 3 people?) * being asked to integrate with various analytics platforms so we can alert some poor schmuck at 3 AM in case the API goes…

> * told to have this run in k8s since everything runs in k8s

I've seen a production system handling one request (which takes a handful of ms) every 2 seconds (work hours only, mind) in k8s running 8 pods. It is quite breathtaking.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#137

Post by devoutsalsa »

zimpenfish wrote: post #136
anw wrote: post #31

It's cathartic to read other people who have to go through this. I'm fighting red tape for my team as we build out a dashboard. Outlook is packed with 1–2 hour meetings for the next 3 months where so far I'm: * being asked to load test our system to make sure it can handle the load (of 3 people?) * being asked to integrate with various analytics platforms so we can alert some poor schmuck at 3 AM in case the API goes…

> * told to have this run in k8s since everything runs in k8s I've seen a production system handling one request (which takes a handful of ms) every 2 seconds (work hours only, mind) in k8s running 8 pods. It is quite breathtaking.

How do they handle the load balancing with that much traffic?

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#138

Post by hef19898 »

avindroth wrote: post #126
spyckie2 wrote: post #35

Being a hedgehog is useful on the journey to domain mastery because sticking to frameworks saves you time and headache compared to not having any frameworks at all. The 3 stages of domain mastery: Stage 1 - No knowledge or structure to approach a domain (everything is hard, pitfalls are everywhere) Stage 2 - Frameworks that are useful to approach the domain (Map to avoid pitfall areas) Stage 3 - Detailed understandin…

Also the social benefit of staying in stage 2 is strong. Stage 3 folks don’t mingle together easily, not just because there are less of them, but also because they have in some ways become themselves. It’s much easier for people to stick together when they believe in something together, whether it’s imperfect or not. And then some stage 3 folks make a new stage 2 thing and the cycle continues. But I think people don’…

I can subscribe to that.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#139

Post by quetzthecoatl »

austincheney wrote: post #75
bombcar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be a good X you must follow the rules. To be a great X you must have followed the rules so well as to learn why they’re there and when they should be broken. Works for almost any X - writer, programmer, driving, etc.

Most people agree with this. The actual challenge is to discern real rules from superficial bullshit. That is a level of criticality many people do not possess and some find hostile or disgusting.

especially when there are too many such rule lists often contridicting with each other. Finding the right list becomes the key for someone (beginner to a domain) who has to follow the rules. That's just luck.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#140

Post by zimpenfish »

gumby wrote: post #15
agbell wrote: post #2

Author here, thanks for sharing this. Let me know what you think. I'm trying to connect the dots on research on expert advice and our fields 'thought-leaders'. The connection is a bit tenuous but I think contingent advice can be shown to be better than non-contingent advice. I also think people are too confident in their opinions. Also another submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27462255

A side point: the hedgehog/fox analogy originated with philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

Technically, I suppose, it was Archilochus: "The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing."

Tetlock seems to have a slightly different interpretation to Berlin - (paraphrased from [1]) "hedgehogs have one grand theory; foxes are skeptical about grand theories".

[1] https://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-bett...

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