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Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

earthly.dev

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Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#161

Post by AstralStorm »

fctorial wrote: post #143
zimpenfish wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Write a script. 1. stop service 2. copy files 3. start service

Now you have two problems, because for high availability you need a failover or better yet, shadow secondary service.

Hot patching wins, but needs good design to work in the first place.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#162

Post by hansor »

Interesting topic but terrible written article.

Article is impossible to understand without knowing some TV series and cartoons(!), and some pop culture trivia from US :/

It could be done right with some kind of explanation of trivia...

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#163

Post by spyckie2 »

iainmerrick wrote: post #154
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…

Your response to this article about how contingent advice is usually better than universal advice is to propose a universal theory?

I did notice the irony myself :)

The article talks about contingent advice being better than universal advice only in stage 3. If you're not then universal advice is helpful. I think that holds true for most people and most subjects, including myself.

Originally, I thought the article did a great job describing a common scenario that occurs usually in decision making and I wanted to describe my intuition on why I think it comes about. It's not really a universal theory, more my own digestion / explanation on the interrelation around hedgehogs vs foxes and my own interpretation of the issues that the articles describes.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#164

Post by bendbro »

iainmerrick wrote: post #154
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…

Your response to this article about how contingent advice is usually better than universal advice is to propose a universal theory?

I'm sure there are contingencies that can make contingent advice worse than universal advice.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#165

Post by carlzukki »

bombcar wrote: post #57
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…

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.

A lot of good ways of looking at this, and your phrasing @bombcar it's really nicely put.

In my opinion, once you play a game for a while, it's easy to know exactly when and how to break ANY rule: you must understand what the rules are there for.

Think of any agile framework, a ton of them are practiced like cults by the most. However, if you think that those are there for 2 simple purposes:

  1. you want to ensure nobody in the team is ever idle
  2. you want to ensure everyone is working on the most relevant available task that hasn't been picked up from others
Then it's easy to see which rules are useful to the goals and which are hurting you, thus you just gotta break them!

This is just an easy example, this is really about anything in life though!

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#166

Post by httpsterio »

iainmerrick wrote: post #154
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…

Your response to this article about how contingent advice is usually better than universal advice is to propose a universal theory?

No, they just taught you, a person with a level 1 understanding of domain expertise, about how domain expertise works ;)

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#167

Post by lbriner »

I despise the title "Thought leader" because it is often artificial and as the author wrote, it doesn't necessarily mean very much. It is also used by conference organisers to make their speakers sound more impressive!

Anyway, I think this scenario sounds very much like the "pigs and chickens" metaphor in agile development. An external thought leader is a chicken. They have no skin in the game and their ideas are easy to communicate without really understanding the context.

In many of these scenarios, multiple product teams are supposed to exist specifically to allow you to use whatever the hell DB engine makes sense to your team. The question isn't then "is squeaky better than bongodb" but which is suitable in this scenario? Will it perform well for this project, can it be supported by this team etc.

Perhaps engineering leadership likes the idea of homogeny across the entire company "we use MySQL exclusively", but is that really necessary? Let's ask the Thought Leaders!

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#168

Post by vitro »

bombcar wrote: post #57
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…

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.

Applies really nicely to music. First you learn the rules so you know when you can break them. But if you start breaking the rules from the start, people will think you have never learned them in the first place.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#169

Post by darkwater »

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…

The other side of the coin you are not telling is: let's ship this small project to production without all those useless bells and whistles, and then fast-forward 12 months, suddenly everybody is using it and it starts failing spectacularly, and now all those teams that complained in the beginning have a fire to extinguish. I've been too many times on this other side of the coin.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#170

Post by circlefavshape »

tomnipotent wrote: post #104
IlliOnato wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just brilliant!

The book is a must-read. I keep multiple copies to give away to anyone receptive. It has aged very well.

+1 on this. Useful for improving communication with anyone, not just children
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