release-please[0] allows you to do a manual version override in a commit, which would allow you to decrement the major version upon reverting a breaking change
I think that could be simplified, so the tool can tell that a commit is reverting a breaking change and thus the version should be decremented, but at least there's an escape hatch.
With a lot of the adult-oriented sets (ICONS and others), especially anything plant-based, they go out of their way to point out how they're using existing pieces in an unusual way. One example is the cherry blossoms on the bonsai tree are actually frogs, but cast in a pink color for the first time, called out in the instruction manual as you're building it.
I love it, knowing about these little details. Also fun to share with friends that inquire about the various LEGO on display in the house. This, and all the fancy mechanics (e.g. typewriter, nintendo), engender a ton of respect and awe for the designers.
Kind of the opposite, I was deep in the R world a decade ago and there was a huge trend of replacing Java dependencies with C/++ ones because the JVM was such a pain to manage. The community eagerly adopted the replacements about as soon as they existed.
I experienced a flavor of this, too. We had some outages, management said no more daytime deploys, so we had after-hours “deploy parties” whose scope and participant count increased weekly. The smarter managers said it was temporary, but couldn’t say how we’d move back towards continuous deployment. If anything went wrong in any service, you’d end up with a dozen or so folks on a zoom call for 3 hours. We did this once or twice a week.
Went on for about a year, worse each week, before i left.
I don’t know how big the market is, but seems pretty commercial-friendly to this old magic player. I have a big box of cards from a few decades ago I’ve held onto. I’ve thought about selling them, but it seems i either take them to a shop and get lowballed, or spend hours meticulously researching each card and then figuring out how to sell it for what it’s worth. taking a pile of photos and having the ID and valuation automated could go a long way! Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?
What sorts of sites are you thinking of? To me, “most useful to a programmer” evokes docs and blogs and github issues and forum posts. I suppose some forums might be AI-resistant (login wall), but the others are trivially AI accessible.
Yeah this sounds pretty reasonable really, like instead of using a CMS directly they’re having Claude file PRs to make the same changes. As someone who likes static sites and change control, it actually sounds like an improvement.
It is, but it’s the only way for a company to succeed and scale over time. A pet approach works well in the early days, but you can’t become a VC-backed success without drastically reducing bus factors throughout the company.
That could be an incentive to keep companies small, but high-scale companies do have unique benefits to society.
My experience as well. It sounds nice at first, but since it’s tied to org flattening these “player-coaches” end up with 15-20 reports, which is way too many for even a pure manager.
I noticed it was especially bad for on-call and incident response; these managers get pulled in to all the incidents because of their status and supposed involvement, but are not particularly useful in those rooms, adding even more cooks to the already crowded kitchen.
This is what i often do, but i have never been able to get many coworkers onboard. In my experience I’d say less than 5% of all software folk i’ve worked with are willing to do an interactive rebase; everyone else finds it too scary
Even before LLMs, Data Science was being replaced by more specialization, IME.
Data Engineers took over the plumbing once they moved on from Scala and Spark. ML Engineers took over the modeling (and LLMs are now killing this job too, as it’s rare to need model training outside of big labs). Data analysts have to know SQL and python these days, and most DS are now just this, but with a nicer title and higher pay.
Once upon a time I thought DS would be much more about deeper statistics and causal inference, but those have proven to be rare, niche needs outside soft science academia.
The easy part is choosing a better end-state; anyone can do that, and for any of these Rube Goldberg machines at a large-ish company, several people likely have.
What makes someone a staff+ is finding a path to iteratively evolving towards that end-state without breaking anything along the way and while having progress to show off at each step.
Your job sure does sound depressing, and it's not one I would succeed at, but if you can power through and turn this product around that's a hell of an accomplishment you'll have to be proud of.
I'm curious what you'd like to do next. You could probably have a great career doing these sorts of turnarounds repeatedly across companies, maybe even as a consultant, but would you want to?
I haven't used CrunchyData for work, but I see you as offering what RDS does plus plenty more. RDS does a lot, but after using Timescale Cloud professionally I saw how much RDS doesn't do, like actually-simple upgrades, one-click forks, etc. and Crunchy looks similar in going beyond RDS.
I think the community would really love to see a direct Fly+Crunchy integration!
Very interesting to see Kurt assert theyre going to "solve managed Postgres", and I'm super curious to know what that means. Does it mean something like RDS, or more like CrunchyData?
I could see them building something RDS-like on their own, but if they're trying to go further than that I wonder if they'll buy or partner with other companies rather than doing it themselves. Neon strikes me as a Postgres-as-a-service that could pair well with Fly.