Eventually, all software becomes complex. Projects that run entirely in the command line are rare, and even simple little web applications seem to get more involved once you actually want to run them somewhere other than localhost. Sure you have your executable package, but there’s also likely to be a […]
Year: 2023
When is running in the cloud worth it?
Running software on cloud providers certainly is convenient, but it’s also really easy to run up the associated bill if you’re not consciously thinking about costs (something most of us, myself included, don’t do often enough). In the vein of “DevOps,” this has led some companies to continue the trend […]
Apps vs. platforms
It’s common for online applications to refer to themselves as a “platform” as soon as they have a public-facing API. Facebook is probably the biggest example of this, but it’s a fairly standard marketing tactic (I used to work for a company that did the same thing). Basically you make […]
Stop calling them “exits” – some companies “left” long ago.
The term “exit” always irritated me when people write about startups. Especially because it only happens when a company is either bought or IPOs. I’m not saying that startups don’t use acquisition (or IPOs if you’re Twitter – never X) as an exit strategy to avoid actually making money, but […]
Data ingestion sucks
If you spend any time on any system that involves importing data, and you’ll likely have heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).” It’s usually muttered (obscenities optional) right around the point a developer has given up on trying to “fix” the data coming into a system and willing […]
Knowledge sharing across development teams is hard
The world is full of applications that are big enough that companies need multiple development teams to work on them. No matter how these teams are organized (but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess they’re not completely cross-functional, even ignoring the hard parts). The benefits to […]
From the “stuff I screwed up” files – caching was a bad choice
OK, so the phrase “caching was a bad choice” isn’t exactly something you expect to hear about software development. Generally, caching is a good thing – it improves performance by reducing calls to your database or external services, saving time and resources by not re-querying or re-computing. What’s not to […]
It’s “Function as a Service”, not “Functions Instead of a Service”
Like just about everybody else who runs software post dot-com bust, I read about Amazon Prime Video re-architecting their monitoring service, and saw all the microservices vs monolith hot takes. For the best monolith vs microservice analysis on the post, I recommend CodeOpinion’s video. What I found more interesting about […]
The bigger picture to software
Working in software development, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking the code is everything, and everything must be in service to the code. After all, not only is the product or service we deliver code, but running on the cloud means your operations are now code, infrastructure is […]
Why you should pave roads
Reading a lot about platform engineering kept reminding me about the concept of the paved road (I’ve also seen the term “golden path”) in software engineering. It’s easy to understand why – if you do platform engineering correctly, then you end up with a paved road. Spotify probably has the […]