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Monoliths and service-oriented architectures

General Commentary, Programming No Responses »

Apr 302020

For some reason, I’ve been seeing a lot of people piping in and saying and/or predicting that monolithic software architecture is going to be making a comeback starting this year. It probably doesn’t help that once I started reading the first article about companies moving from services to monoliths, Google kept highlighting more, but I think the impetus of this was Kelsey Hightower’s unpopular opinion segment arguing that most companies that switch to service-oriented architectures end up creating “distributed monoliths” that are the worst of both worlds. By the way, you’ve likely noted that I’m just using the term “service-oriented architecture” (OK, “SOAs”, because I’m lazy) for both service-oriented architectures and microservices – that’s just to make my life easier – as far as I’m concerned a microservice is just an SOA service with a very small scope.

It’s 11 PM, do you know if your external dependencies are healthy?

General Commentary No Responses »

Mar 312020

Whenever we write applications or services, we generally include some form of health check that we can easily (and regularly) poll to make sure everything is still up and running. That health check likely confirms that your code has access to everything it needs to function correctly. Well, generally that’s “everything it needs that its developers can control.” Rarely does our health check include external dependencies, even though almost all released software has dependencies that are outside the control of its authors. So, how do you tell when the external systems you rely on to work, don’t?

The myth of the “full-stack developer”

General Commentary No Responses »

Feb 282020

Steven Hicks retweeted a great thread by Marco Rogers on “full-stack developers” a little before Christmas last year. I was starting to ponder a post on how it was getting nearly impossible to be a “full stack developer”, but the thread covered a lot more than I was originally planning to, so I want to use it as a starting point. My original idea was going discuss focusing on front-end vs. back-end development, specifically how front-end development has moved away from “be able to write HTML/CSS/Javascript (optionally using jQuery)”, while Rogers’ Twitter thread (very accurately) pointed out there’s much more to the whole “full stack” thing.

Integrity in news

General Commentary No Responses »

Jan 312020

When commenting on political advertising on Facebook and Twitter, I cited Jeff Jarvis’s Unpopular Decisions, but never responded to his comments on the Facebook news tab. While I generally follow Jarvis’s blog precisely because I find his commentary on news insightful and well thought-out, this is a rare instance where his passion for the ideal of journalism seems to eclipse his typical well-thought analysis. In doing so, he missed a great opportunity to use his personal thoughts and opinions to publicly evaluate and potentially update the scope and work of the News Integrity Initiative (NII) that he helped launch

Much ado about ultimately nothing

General Commentary 1 Response »

Dec 312019

Much ado has been made about political advertising on sites like Twitter and Facebook since they announced their general policies around the ads, such as Jeff Jarvis’s take Unpopular Decisions and Ben Thompson’s Tech and Liberty. It’s easy to make this about the companies and the applications they offer, and to complain about how they’re ruining everything, but that strikes me as blaming online applications for the behavior of people offline. It also shifts responsibility for some of the problems onto targets of convenience regardless of responsibility.

Managing infrastructure with Terraform

Work No Responses »

Nov 302019

Part of having mature infrastructure management is treating infrastructure as code. If your infrastructure is on a public cloud, Terraform is a good choice for that “code.” It’s platform-agnostic (at least as agnostic as you’re going to get), easy to learn, and easy to run. If you’re coming from something platform-specific, like AWS’s CloudFormation, you’ll probably feel right at home with Terraform in short order.

Take the requirements meeting

Work No Responses »

Oct 312019

As I noted in my last post, it’s really easy to hate meetings (I’m certainly not the biggest fan of them either), but that doesn’t mean that all meetings are inherently worthless. Some meetings can help give focus and clarity to your work, and that’s a requirements meeting.

The Truth About “10X Engineers”

General Commentary, Programming 1 Response »

Sep 302019

A couple of months ago, developers on Twitter started spamming jokes or frustrations about the mythical “10X engineer” in response to this tweet by a startup investor from India. Thankfully, outside of this guy’s original tweet thread, nobody else was buying the “10X engineer” nonsense. Unfortunately, the fact that this guy tweeted it in the first place means there’s too many people out there laboring under a delusion that desperately need to be set straight.

Are you shipping usable components?

General Commentary, Programming No Responses »

Aug 312019

One of the benefits of using Javascript frameworks like React or Vue is that you can build and export your own custom components. This lets other teams in your organization or even external developers build front-ends that have a consistent look and feel across the board as well as follow any style or branding guide you have. That’s great, but think about the components you’re putting out there for developers to use. Are you putting out the bare minimum or are you shipping front-end tools that speed development up and make people’s lives easier (you know, the whole point of shipping front-end components like this)?

The trouble with Redux

Programming No Responses »

Jul 312019

Do any research into current front-end development, and you’ll hit React pretty quickly. As far as modern Javascript frameworks go, React is probably the standard Javascript framework used by startups and other companies that haven’t already heavily invested in another front-end framework. While React does a decent job of packaging up HTML and Javascript into reusable components, there’s been some design decisions around handling application state in React, namely by using a framework called Redux, that make developing applications harder than it has to be, and make it worth your while to look for other options before you start falling into its rabbit hole too.

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