So apparently there’s this hot new app that just released called Mastodon, and everyone’s leaving Twitter to join that. It’s OK if you haven’t heard of it, it’s that new. Snark aside, people are stumbling onto Mastodon because they’ve been told it’s the biggest Twitter alternative (it probably is), which […]
Year: 2022
Twitter the (breaking) news app
Elon Musk has tweeted extensively about Twitter and journalism, and what that can mean for the future. I know a lot of people like to complain about his approach to running Twitter, but I think there’s something to his ideas. I once thought that WikiTribune would be the bridge that […]
Will platform engineering be the mass-reproducible secret to great software development?
When people talk about the “death of DevOps,” platform engineering is brought up as its successor. That’s probably overstating things. The practices associated with platform engineering certainly look like they have a lot to offer, but getting platform engineering right is difficult. And getting platform engineering right is important, because […]
Is DevOps dead?
I came across an article titled “Devs don’t want to do ops” that started with the premise that developers managing their own production infrastructure is stressful (it is), questioned whether development and operations should be separated again, and settled on declaring “DevOps is dead,” and that platform engineering is the […]
On true believers and mercenaries
If you see any sort of headlines about CEOs and remote work, then you likely heard that Malcolm Gladwell does not like remote work. I had some thoughts on why I think his position (and others like it) is stupid. My position is hardly uncommon – most of the arguments […]
Why don’t we re-use services?
I’ve been thinking a decent bit about architecting services lately, and kept finding myself going to the topic of how useful it would be to make “general infrastructure” services (like an offline job processor, or gateway for capturing client events from your web application) shared resources versus making teams deploy […]
When to give the “back-end API” a REST
I wrote recently about how what most of us build as back-ends aren’t really APIs, but just a back-end that provides data to your Javascript. I’ve emphasized the fact that a basic RESTful back-end is not, in fact, an API, and that there are differences between how you build and […]
More building with Hotwire
I’ve been sitting down and spending some more time with the Hotwire framework after building an initial proof-of-concept and moving towards a simple 0.1 version of something. I still really like the framework, mostly because it simplifies a lot of development, without feeling like I’m sacrificing anything. Not only am […]
New approaches to skilling up future workers
So a (semi-) local coding boot camp is going to be trying something that I really hope works out – partnering with a local company to sponsor and ultimately hire the graduates. I love this idea because of the way it shifts the financial risks in training people for future […]
Truth and speech on the Internet
Something broke with our approach to disagreements. We went from simply arguing with people who were wrong on the Internet to to demands that people be deplatformed because they’re wrong, according to people who seem to be right equally rarely. Thanks to the aggregation of content onto a few major […]