about3fitty

2 maanden geledendiscuss

I think this may be a consequence of hiring for a position with the word “architect” in it. It implies the need for complexity vs. Getting a gaggle of senior devs together and letting them sort out CI/CD and patterns as they are needed. In a lot of cases, an architect is not needed but must justify themselves.

about3fitty

7 maanden geledendiscuss

Besides this being ineffective for the motivated, it might have a subtle antitrust effect.

As kids find alternative platforms, perhaps they will be vendor locked to them instead of the Meta empire.

about3fitty

7 maanden geledendiscuss

This is underappreciated. The number of individual conversations (edges) possible between n engineers (nodes) does not scale linearly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_graph

about3fitty

9 maanden geledendiscuss

As a former employee of state and local government, who walked away from both pensions, this was my takeaway.

At the beginning of a project, the government could spend above market for a great architect to lay down the data model and put some patterns in place which could then be reasonably well maintained by below market rate staff, but there are rules and public pressure.

Interestingly, my local govt hired Deloitte to put in a serverless AWS-based application that could have been a simple CRUD app hosted on a medium EC2 instance. It cost $1.5 million and didn’t work, in addition to the hundreds of thousands per year in cloud costs.

Could have been a Django app with Celery. The cost could have been in the low thousands per year.

It could even have been done with a succinct AWS serverless system.

But that’s not the schmooze that can impress high level stakeholders, themselves less familiar with good design patterns, and win the contract.

about3fitty

9 maanden geledendiscuss

The Supreme Court has weighed in on this with a little more nuance in their decision in Katz v. United States:

“What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”

This “lack of privacy in public” absolutism would mean that there would never be certiorari granted for these types of cases in the first place.

Reductionist at best, IMO

See also United States v Jones, Carpenter v United States

about3fitty

9 maanden geledendiscuss

I think this may be an example of Simpson’s Paradox

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox

about3fitty

10 maanden geledendiscuss

To add to this, engineers consider tradeoffs.

You might choose to add comments and let the logic unfold in a less succinct way in order to improve readability and understandability.

You might also consider your colleagues’ limited cognitive reserves, some of which could be spent on more important issues.

about3fitty

10 maanden geledendiscuss

I wonder if we are back to “who you know” because of a couple of factors:

1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that

2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail

about3fitty

10 maanden geledendiscuss

Cognitive load is super important and should be optimised for. We all should have as our primary objective the taming of complexity.

I was surprised to find an anti-framework, anti-layering perspective here. The author makes good points: it’s costly to learn a framework, costly to break out of its established patterns, and costly when we tightly couple to a framework’s internals.

But the opposite is also true. Learning a framework may help speed up development overall, with developers leaning on previous work. Well designed frameworks make things easy to migrate, if they are expressive enough and well abstracted. Frameworks prevent bad and non-idiomatic design choices and make things clear to any new coder who is familiar with the framework. They prevent a lot of glue, bad abstractions, cleverness, and non-performant code.

Layering has an indirection cost which did not appeal to me at all as a less experienced developer, but I’ve learnt to appreciate a little layering because it helps make predictable where to look to find the source of a bug. I find it saves time because the system has predictable places for business logic, serialisation, data models, etc.