Is MapReduce just MPI for Millenials?

Every few years I awake from my slumber, look around to see if frontend has become a stable platform, then go back to backend for another few years. These folks are doing great work, but the platform and target are still under so much flux. I miss RoR.

Do it for the 💰

Leaders with highly scheduled, rigid calendars (“sorry, can’t help now, my next opening is 2 weeks out”) make it hard to operate well in a fast-paced environment because their schedule isn’t nimble enough. They are in essence dealing this week with the priorities of 2 weeks ago.

I do sometimes worry, though, that I've gotten too *expensive* for writing a lot of code to be a positive-ROI activity.

This is spot on and applies to individual contributors too. If you are bringing a very senior engineer who only worked at big shops, they will get confused why they can’t hand off as much as they used to.

Loyalty is critical in business, but there are different kinds of loyalty. Loyalty to people, loyalty to the business, loyalty to ideas. Know which one you subscribe to, and know what others do. They don’t always mix well.

Working at different types of companies - e.g. "traditional" companies, big tech, startups, agencies, finance etc - you realize this: Different software engineering approaches work better/worse for different companies. There's no one silver bullet across the industry.

Can we acknowledge how ridiculous it is that startups and even individuals can bankrupt themselves... ... with an AWS bill? I cannot fathom why Amazon does not do anything meaningful to allow setting e.g. limits on accounts. Why do we need to hear stories like this on repeat?

Every time I think about the Democratic party, I feel angry. We are a country in suffering. A majority of us want change, and the Dems seem absolutely unable to capitalize on that. The most enraging thing - I don't even think they're trying.

I have never in my adult life felt so detached from my party. Biden seems to have no clue what is going on. Every elected leader seems to have one play and one play only - send contextless emails and texts asking for money. WHAT IS THE PLAN?

AOC is the only leader I've heard articulate any sort of plan. I don't agree with her on everything, but at least she has specific ideas and is willing to try to implement them.

Is this marketing just AI generated at this point? What is a cleanroom for my lakehouse??

This means that nearly 5% of the working population is compromised at any one time. With variants evading both vaccines and prior immunity, and no mitigation methods in place, people will continue getting reinfected over and over, so no herd immunity will be reached.

In total, you're looking at about 10-15% of your team out sick or compromised. Covid seems to cause brain inflammation, people who are infected (or long-covid) often make errors in their work that they don't even detect.

What we did was fail to contain a pandemic when we could have closed borders, done a short, sharp lockdown to isolate and ride out existing infections, vaccinate everyone before variants arose, and then adopt a mask mandate to keep r0 of remaining infections under 1.

A lame service mesh is the worst. If services can't reliably reach each other, the whole dream of microservices falls apart.

i think it was the google SRE book where i first heard this rule of thumb -- you can plan to 10x your current state /at best! if you're lucky!/ -- but anything past that that is foolish, pointless conjecture that will bear no resemblance to reality.

The argument that "we need to use microservices to get hard boundaries between components," is really "we are so undisciplined that we need to add considerable complexity to protect ourselves from ourselves." →