51–60 of 361 posts
So it's not like I have nothing to share after 30 years of experience in the industry, I just have nobody to share it with.
As you might imagine, a lot of these ideas fell by the wayside but we had to develop them in full.
As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by > “Do we really need that?” > “What happens if we don’t do this?” > “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?” as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out…
A really competent senior figures out what the prevailing culture of the company is now, and what it will need to be in 5 years, and adapts as they go. Startups with 5 people maybe don't need extra complexity costing runway. A 500 person business may need that complexity because now there are second-order effects that need to be mitigated for every business decision. It's not a black-and-white "always avoid complexit…
The problem I see is management is playing games with not talking about how much money is available, what the real timelines are, etc - because they fear the people contributing will leave before the critical moment and so people keep making stupid decisions in that context and then you all get to get a new job.
Complexity, if it can be reduced to a single measurable dimension, is only one of several factors in a solution space. There are other properties such as, maintainability, scalability, reliability, resilience, anti-fragility, extensibility, versatility, durability, composability. Not all apply. Being able to talk about tradeoffs in terms of solution spaces, not just along a single dimension, is one of what I consider…
Maps to what we believe on our team - functional vs non-functional. AI ships functional features fast but developers are more important than ever in making sure the non-functional aspects are taken care of
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came to say somethign simular actually. > Ah, baby, this is my senior developer. The avoider, the reducer, the recycler. They want to avoid development as much as they can. There are times when this is good, there are times when actively trying introduce an improvement is the best way forward. A good senior is able to recognise when those times are.
That doesn't sound as good in meetings. The person who can cut scope and get everyone to the "we did it" back patting phase makes everyone feel warm and cozy. Now combing through analytics to determine whether or not what we did was actually good? Less warm and cozy.
Is the improvement likely to reduce maintenance overhead (and thus cost)? Or improve performance allowing for fewer services running (and thus reducing cost)? Or reduce bugs that force people out of a workflow (eg in an online shop, thus fixing it increases sales)?
Or if it’s just tech debt then use Jira (etc) to your advantage and talk about the number of tickets you can close of this sprint due to this engineering initiative.
If the development team and product teams goals are largely aligned then the problem with engineering initiatives is just how you explain them to the product team.
As a /senior/ developer I really dislike blanket statements. I've seen the same amount of failures caused by > “Do we really need that?” > “What happens if we don’t do this?” > “Can we make do for now? Maybe come back to this later when it becomes more important?” as with experimenters. Every system is different, every product is different. If I were building firmware for a CT scanner, my approach towards trying out…
> Yes, yes, of course this is simplistic.
It's an example, put to the extreme, to clearly communicate the ideas. As all things, the golden mean applies, as I understand the article argues for:
> the design of the 'Scale' version is influenced by what worked and what doesn’t work in the 'Speed' version of the system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A sort of survivor bias. A VP ordered to use elastic search, because it worked well at his company before. Turned out it worked well for us. Listen to the VP to make technical decisions. And use elastic search.
Reminds me when the ELK stack was called just ELK (idek what it is now) we had a server we put it on, and after making the additional dashboards my manager wanted, we learned the limits of ES / ELK. It needs a ridiculous amount of memory, because it will shove everything in memory. Same thing when I learned that MongoDB indexing puts every item in memory as well, which is a yikes, why would you not want to index? I b…
That's because it's much, MUCH faster to do it that way, though if you can deal with certain type of latency trade offs for throughput something like turbopuffer can do wonders for your costs.