I stay 1 major version behind with MacOS. If you do that you should have a pretty stable experience. You still get all the security patches but skip most bugs/regressions.
Also the article doesn’t attempt to explore the business and resourcing constraints they were operating under at the time.
I have been in situations where I was told “don’t worry about cost just get it done”. Then a few years later the business constraints shift and now we need to “worry about the cost”. It ignores that decisions made under a different set of constraints were correct, or at least reasonable, at the time but things change.
One of my pet peeves is when people say “do it right the first time” but the definition of “right” often changes over time. If the only major flaw of this design was that it was expensive; then I am much more skeptical that it was wrong given the original set of conditions that they were operating under.
Yeah, this is exactly what I thought when I read this post. It seemed like the author either hasn't worked in big tech, or hasn't worked in the industry very long. It's extremely likely that the engineer who designed this was standing on his desk shouting "it's going to cost THIS MUCH MONEY. I want to make sure that EVERYONE IS OK WITH THIS." and was met with shrugs.
Here's how a big tech reporting chain sees this situation when everything is smooth sailing: "We're growing 3x year-over-year? After 2 years, the cost will be an order of magnitude higher no matter what solution we pick. The constant factor doesn't matter that much. But we have such an incredible roadmap that we will book more than an order of magnitude of revenue, backed by this new ledger project. The cost will always be a nonissue because of growth."
And then 2 years go by, and this incredible product growth adds a bunch of ledger entries that weren't there 2 years ago, someone nudges your reporting chain with the question, "this is pretty expensive.. what gives?" and then someone with a good combination of social and technical skills points out that a migration to your existing storage solution would be a cost effective way to continue growing.
At every step of the way, everyone is generally happy with what's going on.
Also totally possible that it was just an unpublished partnership of sorts between AWS and Uber. AWS wants the logo and a big case study implementation to give the product some credibility or a boost. Uber may not have been charged at all, may have even been paid to use AWS. The Uber developer may not have even known, just was given an edict to build it on dynamodb.
I think it's important for leadership to clearly define what right is in these cases, too, otherwise, you get as many ddefinitions of "right" as you have people, times, and places.
Easy to say, but it's a real human cost to relying on people to figure out what you mean rather than explaining what you mean. Not enough time is spent on cultivating effective communication and training. Everyone wants everything done yesterday and don't feel like investing in their own people.
Amen, right now I’m rewriting some code and parts of an application after running for years. So I have all the advantages of knowing the bugs and history.
There is zero chance anyone who wrote this the first time would do what I’m doing.
Some things I’m simplifying because it never becomes a spot that the previous devs thought would be a big pivot point for customization and heavy use….
If this requirement was in place they would be a bit more careful about terminating accounts because the cost equation would incentivize it. Maybe they would be more careful in their automation or require more than one level of human review before cutting off access.
These companies are gatekeepers for their platform. It isn’t crazy to require them to act more responsibly.
Apple is in the process of fixing Tahoe which was a regression from Sequoia the previous release. Tahoe is decent with 26.4 though from what I am hearing. Either OS version is far far better than regular Windows 11 though.
Apple’s real differentiator is their silicon. M series chips are just incredibly good and you get a full workday out of them on battery.
The M1 Pro I still have at work is easily the best laptop I have ever used. For side projects I use an M4 air with maxed out RAM and it has no issues with anything I have thrown at it.
I'm also still on my M1 and I just don't see a need to upgrade. I've never owned a laptop this long without even considering getting a new one. It's still so fast, so cool, great screen, biometric unlocking... it's just incredible.
I have seen this mostly on teams which refuse to formalize preferences into a style guide.
I have fixed this by forcing the issue and we get together as a team, set a standard and document it. If we can use tools to enforce it automatically we do that. If not you get a comment with a link to the style guide and told to fix it.
Style is subjective but consistency is not. Having a formal style guide which is automatically enforced helps with onboarding and code review as well.
Hard agree here. I think the best predictor of whether someone will be good, eventually, at something is “do they love it”. If they do then chances are they will spend lots of focused time practicing and actively seeking out ways to get better.
Maybe that love, or at least liking something, comes from inherent talent to some degree but all the talent in the world won’t help you if you don’t put in the time.
What I am excited about is the possibility of LLMs to draw conclusions from the last 150years of scientific papers.
There have been lots of instances of knowledge being rediscovered even when it was previously published but sitting on some shelf forgotten. LLMs ability to digest large volumes of data will I think help with this issue.
We will still need to reproduce and verify conclusions but will be interesting to see what might come from this.
Returning an empty result in that case may cause a more subtle failure. I would think returning an error would be a bit better as it would clearly communicate that the caller called the API endpoint incorrectly. If it’s HTTP a 400 Bad Request status code would seem appropriate.
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