This is one of my favorite blog posts of all time.
I love it.
Thank you, CircleCI, for posting this!
It's the Future
21–30 of 146 posts
Re: It's the Future
#22Ah, l33t for system architects. A few days ago, the CTO of Soylent, the food drink, was describing their elaborate computer infrastructure. They have one (1) product and a simple web site. Based on their sales volume, they do about two sales a minute. That could run on a HostGator "Hatchling" account for $4/month, using one of the seven off the shelf shopping cart/payment programs HostGator offers.
Maybe it's for internal apps, managing production of soylent, inventory
Or maybe it's a clever ploy by their sysadmins to avoid being ground up into Soylent themselves
Re: It's the Future
#23Ughhh this.
I just want to give my project to a PaaS and let them figure out everything.
I was looking into Google App Engine, but they didn't support some language features I wanted (e.g. Java 1.8, Servlet 3.X["I know, programming in Java? You're stuck in the past"]). So I looked into their new Container Engine. But like this article points out, it makes deployment 500000000 times more complicated than it should be.
Re: It's the Future
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
What else would the Soylent team do with all the free time not spent preparing and chewing their food like neanderthals?
I like to think its more akin to the Jettsons but I digress...
You both could be right as that is a bit of a conspiracy http://www.visualnews.com/2013/07/16/flintstones-living-with...
// feature request: poster flag's own posts as tangents that start new topics leaving only a graphic (arrow leaving square) in original thread
Re: It's the Future
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Production workflow and inventory management are totally greenfield. No one has ever written apps for that stuff before, nope.
Can we make it cheaper than we can buy it? Is their purchase price more expensive than my hourly wage for a few months?
Can you guarantee success at development? And even if you can, is it a good idea?
The coolest software project I've ever been on was also the dumbest. We were trying to build a bios in-house - something that can be bought off-the-shelf for a buck. In theory, it could have saved us millions in the long run. In the short run, we were wasting man-months of engineering on something that was not our business, when the clock was ticking loudly. Fun as heck, but if I caught my own employees doing such a thing today, I'd at least threaten to fire them if they even thought about it again.
Likewise, Soylent is not in the inventory management business. Why should they be writing inventory management software? Buy that stuff. Focus development money on the core business.
Re: It's the Future
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems to be the problem with a lot of technologies. If you're a HN reader, you can start to get the feeling that you're falling behind if you're not doing these things. Even though they are totally inappropriate for the majority of us who are working on smaller systems.
As an engineer I feel an obligation to know about these things and how they work. It might be appropriate for my work. For my own projects I am just going to start out with a Django or Meteor app and if I'm lucky enough to have to worry about scale I'll have some idea of what to do next.
> It might be appropriate for my work.
so might be AS400, but few are trying to learn that I guess.
Let's be fair, it's quite likely that if anyone is looking into this stuff is more because it's the technology du jour, rather then the off chance that they end up with 100 million users. It could be useful, and learning stuff is fun, but that's not the real drive.
Re: It's the Future
#27To the position that containerization is needless complexity for simple or non-scaling apps: one of the benefits of containers is it can create development environments which can be identical to your production environment(s); no matter what platform you're always running the same code, same artifacts, same images.
Virtualization does this too, but at great cost. I wish the kinks were better worked out at this point as well, and hope we start to converge around a few well-working patterns and toolsets. I expect it to happen. In the meantime it is chaos and easy to laugh at.
Re: It's the Future
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like to think its more akin to the Jettsons but I digress...
You both could be right as that is a bit of a conspiracy http://www.visualnews.com/2013/07/16/flintstones-living-with... // feature request: poster flag's own posts as tangents that start new topics leaving only a graphic (arrow leaving square) in original thread
There's an "off-topic/meta" flag sometimes applied to posts that are more about HN than about the topic, which causes them to float to the bottom (above the stuff greyed-out into oblivion, but below the top comments). Seems reasonable that people could apply that to their own posts.
Re: It's the Future
#29Meanwhile, the last two web applications I've consulted on are now more than 12 years old, use SOAP and where written in Delphi.
They work surprisingly well to this day and despite being horrified upon hearing that this was what they were built on, I found them surprisingly well done.
I wonder what will still be running 12 years from now and what it will look like.
Re: It's the Future
#30Rails? That's so yesterday. New hotness is React! React? I thought we were doing Angular? Come on man, you're stuck in the past!
New, new hotness is React Native (or whenever FB decides to make it also available on Android) and JSBlocks.
New, new, new hotness is Aurelia! Get with the times!
Edit: just wanted to point out that this post was only partially satirical. I absolutely am in love with Aurelia atm.