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The August 17 outage

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Re: The August 17 outage

#741

Post by hirvi74 »

nnx wrote: post #538
hirvi74 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My employer has 0% test coverage lol. I've begged and pleaded, but the claim is that "risk is low" and "that's what QA is for." Hell, I've complained to senior management about how there are senior devs that forgo backend validation. It's truly Hell in the trenches sometimes. Some days, I would seriously rather work at Wendy's.

> Some days, I would seriously rather work at Wendy's. Narrator: He would not.

If such a job paid even half as much, I would quit today. I can continue to program computers as a hobby. Occupational programming has essentially eroded my passion over the years.

Money is not important to me insofar as I have enough to live an average life. I don't need anymore than that.

Re: The August 17 outage

#742

Post by peab »

throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #545
peab wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment comes up over and over again and it's incredibly ignorant. To give just a single example, ai code dev has enabled people to make tools for themselves that they didn't have before. I've made a language learning app for myself. Its working better than Duolingo so far, for me. Its not really public

Speaking of ignorance, how does your success story relate to the societal issues GP brought up?

It relates to software making my life better, as OP said he can't see any examples of this

Re: The August 17 outage

#743

Post by peab »

gilrain wrote: post #660
peab wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment comes up over and over again and it's incredibly ignorant. To give just a single example, ai code dev has enabled people to make tools for themselves that they didn't have before. I've made a language learning app for myself. Its working better than Duolingo so far, for me. Its not really public

> I've made a language learning app for myself. Its working better than Duolingo so far, for me. Its not really public On the other hand, famine is coming. Come back and read this next year. Was your dalliance worth these food shortages?

Food production is at record highs last time i checked, thanks to technology

Re: The August 17 outage

#744

Post by peab »

zombot wrote: post #477
peab wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment comes up over and over again and it's incredibly ignorant. To give just a single example, ai code dev has enabled people to make tools for themselves that they didn't have before. I've made a language learning app for myself. Its working better than Duolingo so far, for me. Its not really public

Having an app means exactly nothing. How good your language skills will be after N years of learning is the actual measure of whether it's worth anything.

True, i agree. Which is why it will take quite some time for this technology to diffuse and for people to learn which apps really are good

Re: The August 17 outage

#745

Post by peab »

layer8 wrote: post #735
peab wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment comes up over and over again and it's incredibly ignorant. To give just a single example, ai code dev has enabled people to make tools for themselves that they didn't have before. I've made a language learning app for myself. Its working better than Duolingo so far, for me. Its not really public

Most people would prefer an excellent language learning app to simply be available and ready for them to use, rather than having to come up with how such an app could best work, and to get an AI to implement it by themselves, and having to iterate on that. Just like most people simply want to buy nice clothes, and don’t want to become fashion designers and managers of a clothing factory. So far it doesn’t look like A…

I think I agree. But it's nice to have the option. Furthermore, i think it's too early to see the results of this, as technology takes a while to diffuse. Since there are so many people trying to take advantage of the hype to make a quick buck, it takes time to figure out what is actually useful and what is not

Re: The August 17 outage

#746

Post by spyc »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #184

"... these incidents make clear that we must accelerate this work." It feels like GitHub maybe needs to slow down? 'We must change things faster' is a wild way to start off an eight hour hard-down postmortem.

I think he meant to say "prioritize" so that availability related work sees results sooner — "acceleration" — than it would without an increase in priority.

Re: The August 17 outage

#747

Post by 999900000999 »

inigyou wrote: post #705
hirvi74 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard anyone ever utter the words, "Microsoft makes great products and services." They basically built an empire on brand recognition and vendor lock-in. Of course, a lot of their success was due to catching lightning in a bottle a few times at the right moments. It is miraculous how they continue to fail upwards somehow. I suppose it's because they just vampirically sustain themselves by acquiring other…

It's because they understand capitalism better than they understand software. The former is how you win capitalism, the latter is just a cost center. Same with Oracle. Both of them are good at getting contracts and then executing them not poorly enough that it's breach of contract but not well enough that the customer stops paying. That's their business, not software.

Vendor lock in is a hell of a drug.

Would you want to go and spend billions to migrate off Microsoft/Oracle when you could just not and get to the next quarter.

Re: The August 17 outage

#748

Post by lelandfe »

afc wrote: post #647
concerned_user wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If page has 15 requests and needs data from all of them to work correctly, then with 20% failure rate you are suddenly close to 100% non-functional page from the user perspective.

+1. This is a very real problem in practice. A technique we've used to deal with this situation: in the overloaded backend (that has to reject some percentage of incoming requests), group the incoming requests by the parent request (the one with the 1:15 fan out) and reject according to the parent request. One way to put it, simply (though somewhat inaccurately), would be: reject 100% of traffic from 20% of users, ra…

A nice technique to learn of this situation is to fail ("black hole") random resources in synthetic loads of the frontend. This lets you find out 'bout these single points of failure, and then you can start adding fallbacks.

This is a pretty ancient thing as far as the FE goes: https://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/06/01/frontend-spof/

Re: The August 17 outage

#749

Post by TorKlingberg »

_heimdall wrote: post #300
kylecazar wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GH processes at the commit level for things (including actions) even though they're bundled in a push... it's relevant to the load on their infrastructure.

In what way? If I have multiple local commits pushed once I expect to see CI type actions to run once for the push rather than for ever commit in the push.

This is configurable in Github Actions. Many projects want to run CI for each commit to avoid situations where one commit breaks the build and the commit after in the same push or PR fixes it. Broken commits in the history makes bisecting harder.

Re: The August 17 outage

#750

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

ozgung wrote: post #508
m4rtink wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much more stuff and growing- what it is actually useful for ? Are we getting actually more done than with previous volumes or is it just all wasted energy?

Has anyone noticed an increase in the quality, performance or capabilities of the software they use?

At my company, we are using AI to clean up huge amounts of technical debt that would have just hung around otherwise, so yes. I'm not sure that your average user would notice, but we do without a doubt have a much better product now.
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