Software and Other Shenanigans – Page 3 – Software development and anything else that appeals to the software developer writing this.

Taking the Scott Adams better congressional incentives challenge

Feb 282023

Back in December, Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) posted a tweet commenting on the general dissatisfaction on the budget omnibus bill that had recently passed. It’s a surprisingly interesting problem, because Congress largely sets its own rules, so any change can be just as easily undone or even ignored in the name of an “emergency” or “extenuating circumstances” (which are incredibly easy to find if you don’t want to live by the rules). In other words, how do we convince people to act against their own self-interest without having the direct power to set the rules they’re operating under? I think there’s a potential solution, but it’s going to hinge on several states getting on board.

Why are cross-functional teams so hard to build?

General Commentary, Programming No Responses »

Jan 312023

So after taking a brief break to write about Twitter, because that’s everyone’s new favorite hobby, I wanted to revisit part of my central thesis in my posts on platform engineering – that it’s hard to find places with actual cross-functional teams capable of doing everything needed to build and run an application or service from concept to being used in production. I’m not totally sure why this is something that organizations don’t want to do, but I still don’t platform engineering is the solution (or as I’m sure some companies will try to spin it, “compromise”). Continue reading »

Decentralization and aggregation

General Commentary No Responses »

Dec 312022

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 isn’t really saying much – there aren’t a lot of Twitter alternatives that anyone would really think twice about. It does a good job of replicating the basic Twitter experience, type some things into a box and click the post button to publish. But there are important, non-obvious (to general users) differences between Mastodon and Twitter, and people seem to be struggling with them.

Twitter the (breaking) news app

Java, Shenanigans No Responses »

Dec 122022

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 leads to a new type journalism due to its wiki-style approach. I was clearly wrong, as WikiTribune lasted about 2 years and is now a social media site. Twitter, however, may be able to succeed where WikiTribune failed, assuming it can figure out a business model that keeps the servers on.

Will platform engineering be the mass-reproducible secret to great software development?

General Commentary, Programming No Responses »

Nov 302022

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 that’s the only way platform engineering is going to work. Otherwise, what you’re going to end up with is a mashed-up team of random engineers desperately trying to keep infrastructure afloat while developers wreak havoc on everything.

Is DevOps dead?

General Commentary, Programming, Shenanigans No Responses »

Oct 312022

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 future. It was quite a ride. It also raised some good questions about DevOps, and the ideal approach to building and running code. Is DevOps really dead? Is platform engineering really the future? What does it mean to “own your own code in production?”

On true believers and mercenaries

General Commentary, Shenanigans No Responses »

Sep 302022

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 for returning to the office revolve around saying either a) people can’t collaborate unless they’re in the same room (the fact that team-based jobs kept up just fine since Covid happened thoroughly disproved that), b) we need it for the “culture” (“culture” has nothing to do with physical proximity, and isn’t as valued as some people think it is – although looking at that meme makes me miss the days when we at least got cubicles), or c) people aren’t productive working from home (they weren’t productive in the office either, you just thought they were because you saw them sitting at a desk). In my tweet thread, I brought up a personal hypothesis that you can group most people into 1 of 2 groups, “true believers” and “mercenaries,” that I thought warranted more details than you can get on Twitter.

Why don’t we re-use services?

Programming, Projects No Responses »

Aug 312022

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 and manage their own instances of those services in the broader context of their own work. Re-using existing services has a lot of appeal, but it’s really something that needs specific conditions to succeed. That said, advances in cloud provider functionality would have made implementing a lot of services easier, and my general approach to building applications has changed as a result. Continue reading »

When to give the “back-end API” a REST

General Commentary, Programming No Responses »

Jul 312022

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 run the 2. However, there are also very important similarities to REST back-ends and APIs that you need to remember.

More building with Hotwire

Education, Kotlin, Programming, Projects No Responses »

Jun 302022

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 I not doing as much work in the front-end, but the advantage of server-side rendering means there’s little to no state to manage in the front-end, which seems to be a huge part of front-end development. Moving from the “standard” way of writing a static webpage and populating it based on JSON data to rendering the page on the server-side is a change in how back-end development gets approached, but really it’s not as much as you may think. I stand by my comments in my original post – Hotwire is my first choice for a front-end framework.

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