nbouscal

There’s no such thing as general tech priorities, it’s just an amalgam of a bunch of individual priorities. In most of the cases I’ve seen those priorities are very reasonable. If you start a tech company and prioritize fiddling with internal messaging software over building your product, you’re going to fail. Prioritizing tech doesn’t mean yak shaving every random task, it means outsourcing as many non-essential tasks as you possibly can so that you have as much time and attention as possible for the one specific technical task that matters: building your product.

Maybe consider that we have literally hundreds of priority tasks, all of which are legitimately very important, and that while we can spend the time necessary to install and maintain non-turnkey solutions, we’d really prefer to work on one of the other priorities with that time.

I replaced Rails with PostgREST, which is written in Haskell but for me as a user is just a binary that I run in front of my database, so now I don’t have to write any backend code at all.

Good enough for you?

The following isn’t the top reason I recommend Postgres, but is the reason I think least likely to be echoed in a dozen other comments:

Postgres has some of the best documentation of any software product I’ve ever used. If someone wants to learn about SQL or databases, I always have to restrain myself from recommending that they just read the Postgres manual front to back. It’s comprehensive, it’s well written, it’s easy to navigate, and almost every explanation comes with several clear examples. It’s hard to overstate how valuable a property that is for a product as central to your architecture as your primary transactional database.

My background is more like yours. For me it’s likely a difference in size and type of companies worked for.

> I was hoping that the article would explain what devops really means today and how I can jump on the devops wagon to hopefully make my job of doing all of the above easier.

1. Use AWS Fargate for all of your backend services. Keep the architecture simple enough that complicated service discovery issues etc don’t come up. If you need coordination between services, do it through Redis or similar.

2. Use RDS unless you really need to save money or use unavailable extensions.

3. Use terraform for initially provisioning the above

4. Set up CI/CD such that merges to master automatically update your services. (I like CircleCI’s aws-ecr and aws-ecs orbs for this.)

Pretty simple recipe, but it means no setting up servers, no hardening servers, no installing or optimizing software (other than by adding it to the Dockerfile), no installing or optimizing the database.

This recommendation reflects what modern devops means to me; opinions differ. To me it means:

- Infrastructure as code (terraform rather than clicking buttons in the AWS console then later forgetting which buttons you clicked)

- Immutable infrastructure (aka cattle not pets). Never SSHing into a server again.

- Automated testing and deployment cleanly integrated with existing dev workflow

Obviously there’s a scale at which you have to do something more complex, but I’d say that’s the scale at which you previously would have had an operations team.

Getting rid of the “writing server side code” and “writing front end code” parts is beyond the scope of devops, but you can skip a lot of the “writing server side code” part by using PostgREST. In exchange you may have to write an even-more-untold number of SQL queries, depending on your current practices.

Edit: Someone helpfully pointed out that I forgot to mention anything about logging or monitoring, which is a pretty glaring omission. On that front I strongly recommend Honeycomb. To set it up with Fargate you may need to run it in a sidecar container, but it’s fairly straightforward.

I assume eatonphil is correct, but to be honest I’ve never even tried, and in my view that’s actually part of the point: full commitment to immutable infrastructure, made really easy. If something needs to change, I tweak the Dockerfile or the task definition or a config file and redeploy. No more SSH.

I’m using Fargate for almost everything now, and am never going back. It’s extremely simple and easy, does exactly what it says it does, and saves me a ton of time and headaches. (I use Terraform to set up services, and CircleCI (with the ECS orb) to deploy updates.)

> The second case is more risky

Not if they're otherwise identical companies, it isn't. There may be reasons to expect a correlation between risk and cash holdings, or something to that effect, but ultimately a share in a company is a share of ownership of that company's assets. If a company didn't become $10B more valuable when given $10B in cash, where exactly did that value disappear to? Value doesn't vanish into thin air simply because it's now owned by a company.

I'm arguing nothing of the sort. While it probably feels good to strawman everyone who disagrees with you, it certainly isn't helping you persuade anyone, nor is it allowing you to learn from other perspectives.

While we may theoretically have the power to change the way law enforcement works on these issues, doing so would be dramatically more difficult than making marginal improvements within the industry itself. We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

adventured is having a really hard time with your phrase "two identical companies". The answer to your question is yes, if you had two identical companies and then gave one of them $10B in cash, that company would be worth $10B more.

> The digital economy is giving us a world in which the benefits are concentrated among consumers and the Big Five who serve them. Everyone else just lives in it.

This is a really weird phrase. "Concentrated among consumers"? More than 80% of Americans use the internet, not exactly "concentrated".

> The law should be handling sexual harassment.

I think people on both sides of this issue would love it if the law showed itself capable of handling sexual harassment cases. Unfortunately we have way too much evidence that that just isn't the case. The obvious example that comes to mind is Brock Turner getting three months, and that's in the best case where someone is actually convicted. Far too often it never gets to that point, not because the harassment/assault didn't occur, but because the legal system is so utterly shit at handling it. The 'outragism' that so many people decry only exists in the first place because every system that is supposed to prevent or punish these acts has failed so completely.

'Not useless' is not a high enough bar in software. Flexibility always adds complexity, and complexity is a cost. Sometimes that cost is worth it, but the benefit needs to be much larger and clearer than 'not useless'.