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My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

blog.dijit.sh

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Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#141

Post by nl »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #81
nickpeterson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re telling me if one writes a plug-in that integrates with source control checkins and provides these summaries plus an additional terser summary to nontechnical users, I wonder if companies would buy that?

The obvious problem with this is that you'd be sending all your (presumably proprietary) source code directly to ChatGPT, i.e. OpenAI, i.e. Microsoft, with a dubiously vague license to use it to improve the ChatGPT product. I can't think of a single company I or someone I know has worked at that has a security department/person that would allow this. Maybe very small businesses wouldn't care that much?

> I can't think of a single company I or someone I know has worked at that has a security department/person that would allow this. Maybe very small businesses wouldn't care that much?

Well there are lots of open source companies where this isn't a concern. Even outside that lots of businesses use GitHub as a code repository just fine, and the GitHub tools can read your code to eg scan for security vulnerabilities.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#142

Post by rqtwteye »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #139
rqtwteye wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality in most larger companies managers mainly do reporting. There is not much emphasis on productivity.

My experience with good managers at large companies is they do a lot of work to make sure the rest of the company doesn’t get in the way of their developers. Which yes, mostly involves a lot of reporting and meetings with other people on the company. But it probably is more important for the productivity of their reports than what managers do at smaller companies, even if it seems like it accomplishes nothing.

I think they would spend their time better on improving processes and removing obstacles but that almost seems a taboo to point out. I have seen tons of scrum retrospectives that got ignored as soon as the problems were outside the reach of the immediate team. In the end you can do as much estimation and reporting as you want, but things still get done by doing them, not by talking about them

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#143

Post by lmm »

Mavvie wrote: post #131
lmm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In terms of ACID, a consistency issue is something like, for example: "The client ordered an item, and the count of item availability was reduced by 1, but no actual order was saved in the database. An item is now 'lost' with no trace of where it went and how it disappeared." > There is even another consistency hazard right in this very example: "The count of item availability was supposed to be reduced by 2 becaus…

How can eventual consistency handle the inventory use case as well as an ACID system? You can't tell the user "your order is placed successfully" and then later tell them "actually no, it was out of stock".

That's a different problem from your previous examples, and it's the same problem whether it's ACID or not: there's always an opportunity for the user to see the item as being in stock, then request to order it, and discover it's out of stock. Your "recovery" from the case where there's nothing in stock doesn't need to happen in a transaction (and can't meaningfully do so); you just tell the user their order failed, and again you do that the same way whether it's ACID or not.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#144

Post by aprdm »

ilyt wrote: post #118
dijit wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very likely you're right, as mentioned in another comment (and in the article I think) I didnt know the semantics of the backup system, I’d just tested with a couple of 400G HDDs - then the NFS endpoint I was given to replace those drives was behaving differently and a deep investigation across wide timezones and uncommunicative teams began. We have the benefit of hindsight now so things can be more clear than they w…

It's particularly nice as it allows to do point in time recovery - you can tell PostgreSQL to replay WALs up to a given point so if say corruption happened because of some code bug you could play the database to the point minute before. Backup process is two part * archive logs as they come in - PostgreSQL have hook that will run program with the WAL segment to archive so just need to put whatever you want to use to…

I believe games usually have assets too and not just metadata, would you put gbs of data in Postgres row ?

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#145

Post by dragonwriter »

lmm wrote: post #128
dragonwriter wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Transactions are inherently useless in a web service, for example, because you can’t open the transaction on the client (1) There is no reason you couldn’t , in a stateful, connected web app (or a stateful web service) open backend DB transactions controlled by activity on the client. You probably don’t want to, because, “ew, stateful”, and would prefer to use compensation strategies to deal with business transacti…

> (1) There is no reason you couldn’t, in a stateful, connected web app (or a stateful web service) open backend DB transactions controlled by activity on the client. You probably don’t want to, because, “ew, stateful”, and would prefer to use compensation strategies to deal with business transactions that span beyond a database transactions, but you could. You'd have to break the rules of how web systems are meant t…

> You never need that if these things are the result of a fixed client request; the set of things to be done can't change, so eventual consistency will serve the purpose.

Yes, if I wanted to handle orders of magnitude more simultaneous requests than this app could conceivably ever need to, but with more app complexity and greater latency for substantive results even at it's existing scale, I could use an EC solution instead of an ACID one, but...I don’t.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#146

Post by winrid »

e40 wrote: post #61
anyfoo wrote: post #44

> and begin real investigation you will quickly find that many databases that are popular are totally fine losing data. MongoDB being the most famous example that I can think off of the top of my head. Always pisses me off. University teaches the principles of ACID and how hard databases work to adhere to these principles, and then so called "NoSQL" comes along and says "lol we have eventual consistency".

It is very frustrating that many of the NoSQL databases aren't ACID. Some even say they are, but they aren't. Frustrating to me because we have one that is, and it's a lot of work and harder to win benchmarks against the ones that fake it or aren't.

Which ones are lying?

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#147

Post by User23 »

nickpeterson wrote: post #23
MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm beginning to think that making more money by becoming a better developer is hard, and that managing, while difficult in a totally different way, is less hard. At least for the money.

I think people often convince themselves that becoming a manager is a path for those who couldn’t hack it. In reality it’s a completely different set of problems. If you’re a decent developer with phenomenal soft skills, there is a very good chance you’d be better in management or sales than writing code.

Management and Sales also don't usually end up on the on-call rotation. While there are exceptions, usually particularly key individuals, in general developers are at the bottom of the white collar company social ladder. Thus status conscious individuals will view management as an upgrade from development.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#148

Post by ZephyrBlu »

mason55 wrote: post #57
pcthrowaway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own observation is that it's more important for managers to be well-organized, remember details, and keep track of things Not sure if that's what you mean by soft skills, but I generally think of soft skills as things like ability to communicate well, navigate conflict, and apply emotional intelligence to people management The "soft skills" as I understand them are more important for roles like team lead/staff, wh…

> My own observation is that it's more important for managers to be well-organized, remember details, and keep track of things It's interesting, I feel like this applies to a line manager. Once you get beyond that you can just hire to fill in your own weaknesses. If you're bad with organization, just hire a good project manager. I guess that's how you end up with the Pareto principal. Even just moving from being a li…

Yeah, in terms of actual skills it's weird that you have to climb the ladder because each role is so different from the previous role.

I'm sure there's some overlap, but not enough to really warrant the lower role being preparation for the higher role.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#149

Post by yathaid »

dijit wrote: post #77
znpy wrote: post #9

The author makes a good progression in their reasoning but then somehow arrives to the wrong conclusion: > So when someone says that Amazon has invested a lot of money into security I think about the fact that Ubisoft spent $1M on a backup solution that didn’t work for the game that would have had the best use of it. The missing point here is thst ubisoft is/was spending money for something outside of its domain of e…

I wrote the article in a fit of anger because someone (on hackernews) said that Amazon spent a lot of money on security therefore its better than whatever [you] could possibly need. The main thesis of the post is that sometimes incentives are not aligned and you still need to think critically about what you bought and what its intended purpose is, the cost of a thing does not mean it fits your need. You can pull a tr…

"The main thesis of the post is that sometimes incentives are not aligned"

Sure, but your example of AWS and security is exactly the opposite where incentives are aligned.

"but its not the right tool just because it costs as much or more than a train does. "

Yes, and you didn't investigate the impedance mismatch between your tool (PgBackRest) and your backup system. What this has to do with your stray bullet to AWS I have no idea.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#150

Post by xupybd »

ilyt wrote: post #118
dijit wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very likely you're right, as mentioned in another comment (and in the article I think) I didnt know the semantics of the backup system, I’d just tested with a couple of 400G HDDs - then the NFS endpoint I was given to replace those drives was behaving differently and a deep investigation across wide timezones and uncommunicative teams began. We have the benefit of hindsight now so things can be more clear than they w…

It's particularly nice as it allows to do point in time recovery - you can tell PostgreSQL to replay WALs up to a given point so if say corruption happened because of some code bug you could play the database to the point minute before. Backup process is two part * archive logs as they come in - PostgreSQL have hook that will run program with the WAL segment to archive so just need to put whatever you want to use to…

I'm a bit green when it comes to db back ups. Do you have anything I can read on this approach it sounds really promising but I don't think I understand it?
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