371–380 of 476 posts
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> who doesn't want instantaneous global writes I want to gently note since I see a lot of misunderstanding around Spanner and global writes: Global writes need at least one round trip to each data center, and so they're still subject to the speed of light.
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I'm not a user of Fly.io. I can't help but notice how remarkable the effect of open communication on potential end users like me. I remember reading about their reliability problems on HN some time ago. That biased my view of the company. After reading this, the open communication and transparency restored my trust in them, and would make them again a potential candidate for future projects. Because now I know that t…
This is probably therapy, but your message and fly.io's post resonates a lot with what I'm going through. I took a product owner role about 6 months ago, my first, with a company that has turned out to be just a mired mess, and a product universally hated both internally and externally. Long story short, it's completely over-engineered by a bunch of intellectual engineers with no focus, no discipline, and no oversigh…
i do enjoy programming, working with other devs, but as soon as i stepped into a product management role it's a hellishly different set of problems. you're in the middle of the tech, the developers, the problems, and the customers. lots of lessons in there. tiring, but worthwhile.
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> I'd love to understand why you think this is the only outcome. I’m curious why you think it isn’t? On a long enough timescale all good things seem to be acquired by large megacorps for a fuckton of money. Slack, Linode, Minecraft, the list goes on. Eventually they all make the thing less than it was before under the founders’ vision. At least from my perspective. It won’t stop me from cheering them on, but I’m stil…
Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter (kinda), Valve all have not been acquired and have existed for a long timescale...
Except Valve I guess, but that was never a public company that could be acquired to satisfy investors in the first place.
Fundamentally I think some of the problems come down to the difference between what Fly set out to build and what the market currently want. Fly (to my understanding) at its core is about edge compute. That is where they started and what the team are most excited about developing. It's a brilliant idea, they have the skills and expertise. They are going to be successful at it. However, at the same time the market is…
> generous free level of service, Can't you make the argument that Heroku got out of this market on purpose? I know they were bought out by "ye old corporate greedy meanie overlord" or whatever but... I'm sure there is data that showed it made sense from a "make money business" perspective to not be in that market.
I've been doing reliability stuff for near two decades. The one thing I am sure of is there is no way to just engineer your way to reliability. That is to say, no person, no matter how smart, can just invent some whizbang engineering thing and suddenly you have reliability. Reliability is a thing that grows, like a plant. You start out with a new system or piece of software. It's fragile, small, weak. It is threatene…
It's seems true for fly's problem space, but in many problem spaces there really are easy engineering solutions to reliability problems.
For a very easy example, I once worked on a rails app that crashed frequently and managed 5 req/s at best. It turns out the app only loaded static data from hardcoded json files on disk and templated that into stuff. In other words, it was a static site. Replacing it with an actual static site + nginx and a cdn instantly fixed all reliability issues for that website forever, and made it easier to maintain the content to boot.
Solving hard problems like this seems interesting.
On the other hand it could be a giant shit show of micromanagement and toxicity, who knows really.
At the moment they aren't hiring though so that's that.
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Your job sure does sound depressing, and it's not one I would succeed at, but if you can power through and turn this product around that's a hell of an accomplishment you'll have to be proud of. I'm curious what you'd like to do next. You could probably have a great career doing these sorts of turnarounds repeatedly across companies, maybe even as a consultant, but would you want to?
> that's a hell of an accomplishment you'll have to be proud of. It's hinted by the C-level that if I can pull this off, it would be nothing short of a miracle. I'm pretty sure I can negotiate salary, education, bonus, and what not if I can pull this off. As far as next, I've thought about that. It would be funny to call myself a turnaround specialist. This would be quite a remarkable feat, but I really don't know if…
Do this up front. Do it as soon as you possibly can. You will lose a huge amount of negotiating leverage if you "wait until you show them". I cannot stress this enough.