wjossey

It’s important to keep in mind that 12 years ago, the patterns for high scale message queues (and often even low scale) were still in flux and getting established.

In the ruby world, delayed job was getting upended by sidekiq, but redis was still a relatively new tool in a lot of tool-belts, and organizations had to approach redis at that time with (appropriate) caution. Even Kafka by the mid 10s was still a bit scary to deploy and manage yourself, so it might have been the optimal solution but you potentially wanted to avoid it to save yourself headaches.

Today, there are so many robust solutions that you can choose from many options and not shoot yourself in the foot. You might end up with a slightly over complicated architecture or some quirky challenges, but it’s just far less complex to get it right.

That means fewer blog posts. Fewer people touting their strategy. Because, to be frank, it’s more of a “solved” problem with lots of pre existing art.

All that being said, I still personally find this stuff interesting. I love the stuff getting produced by Mike Perham. Kafka is a powerful platform that can sit next to redis. Tooling getting built on top of Postgres continues to impress and show how simple even high scale applications can be——

But, maybe not everyone cares quite the way we do.

This stuff is hard. As someone who runs infra teams for a living, these are the worst kinds of weeks.

Hang in there. You all will learn from this and be better for it. Your architecture will improve. Customers will give you a second chance. This too shall pass.

Sending positive vibes.

I was lucky enough to visit the broadcast studios seven or so years ago for a taping of windows weekly. It was a bucket list item of mine after I started listening to Leo in 2008 during grad school.

It beat my wildest expectations, getting to watch live one of the best in the business. Even after taping for nearly two hours, with a fast turn around to his next show, he was kind enough to grab me his fez hat, take a couple of photos behind the desk, and chat with me about life.

I still look at that photo from time to time, and remember the joy I felt that day. Those are those special moments that make life so beautiful.

Right now, we just require intermediate services to be spun up if you need to connect with a custom downstream service.

So, as an example, if I have three services where A talks to B, B talks to C, and I have a custom version of A & C that require testing E2E, we have to spin up B in the middle.

It definitely is a point of confusion for engineers who have to understand what intermediate services are in play when working on a frontend and some distant backend microservice. Fortunately, that intermediate layer tends to just always be the same two services, so folks learn pretty quickly. At scale, especially hyper-scale in a microservices architecture, this becomes untenable, and either automatic dependency discovery OR routing (like you designed) is the path forward.

Needless to say, it's a "niche" issue I think folks don't run into for a while in their setups; however, once you run into it, it's a PIA for those involved.

As someone who has built out a similar internal tool, one of the things I'm excited to see someone do is the route propagation technique. It's something I've evaluated adding to our internal solution as we rolled out a service mesh, but ultimately we manage routing in a different way under the hood.

Either way, this notion of slices of environments being deployed for testing, with "baseline" or fallback environments being used otherwise, is the future of software development. It's a real boon for developers when rolled out effectively, and I've seen it scale massively at GoodRx.

Congrats to the team. Wish you all tons of success!

Sean Kelly (aka Stabby), is one of the most talented engineers I’ve ever worked with, and is someone who understands the challenges and pitfalls of architecture ahead of his time, as this article highlights so well. To this day, I try to channel Sean’s approaches to design, coding, and architecture, in my own work.

Sean is a treasure in the Boston and Golang community, and folks should seek out his wisdom and guidance.

I took 5 weeks off from my startup when I had my first, and I’ll be taking 3 months off for my second who arrives end of the month. I’m at a larger organization now in a leadership role, and my past startup I was one of three.

As others are already writing, you should take some bonding time and adjustment time, regardless of company size. Those first few weeks are a huge adjustment, and you need to focus on your family, partner, and newborn, more than a company.

How long is appropriate then becomes a question of a number of factors. I don’t want to make a value judgment on anyone who feels like 2 weeks is enough vs someone who says 12 weeks is the minimum. Life is complicated and nobody knows your situation better than you. But, you should optimize first for your family, and then once that is finished, figure out what a return to work timeline looks like.

Parenthood is such a wild journey with its own unique set of challenges, struggles, and joys. My best to you and your partner.

Godspeed.

Both platforms are worth supporting. Com does a lot of great events and creates great content, and I like supporting it. I also prefer their UX.

Lichess has Maia bot, some good course material as well, and I like to use my lichess account sometimes as an “alt” where I can experiment with less stress about losing rating. Rating doesn’t matter, but it still makes me queasy if I tilt 100 points while trying out a new opening.

Always excited when chess pops up on HN once a month or so. As someone who picked it up as a hobby in December, I can attest that lichess is a great app and site for folks looking to get back into the game or get started (I’m also a premium chess.com member as I use both products).

For those of you thinking about picking up chess, I’d highly recommend watching the Chess Brah “Building Habits” series on YouTube. Watch the first five or so videos, and just start practicing those habits in rapid games (recommend 15 minute with 10 second increment on lichess, which shows up as 15+10). Embrace the losses, and just keep working on not hanging your pieces for free.

If you’re intimidated by playing other humans, you can try the “Maia 1” bot on Lichess. It’ll likely beat you up for a while if you’re a beginner, but it’s a bot designed to play more like a human, and it’ll help you get the reps to feel more comfortable playing other humans.

From there, just enjoy yourself. Chess can be frustrating because by design you always lose about 50% or your takes, but once you learn to accept the losses, it can be a great mental exercise to keep your brain sharp.

You're 100% right. Thanks for adding Danya.

We do 30 minute daily “standup ups” where the “what I’m currently focused on” component lasts for 10 minutes. Our group discussions, that are IC led, that come out of challenges or successes folks are facing, make up the last 20 some days (otherwise we wrap).

Of the 8 hours a day of my work, it’s the least likely to be a waste of time. It’s a great way for our distributed team to stay connected, express interest in work streams, and have a laugh.

Work can be so much more than just optimizing productivity to the nth degree.

Dropped out of a comp sci PhD program after a year for this exact same reason. Will go get my masters some day so I can teach in retirement, but was saddened teaching in higher ed couldn’t be the end game.

As a student pilot, this drives me nuts. The volume of abbreviations, especially in NOTAMS, METARs, etc, is a bit obscene.

What’s wonderful too is that the abbreviations are often based on non English words as well, so they aren’t intuitive. As an example, instead of typing “mist” in a METAR it is “BR” based on the French word brume.