Always consider your design a subsystem. Jabe Bloom When we build software, we aren’t building it in nowhere. We aren’t building a closed system that doesn’t interact with its environment. We aren’t building it for our own computer (unless we are; personal automation is fun). We are building it for a purpose. Chances are, we …
Today in a keynote at Spring One, Tom Gianos from Netflix talked about their internal data platform. He listed several components, ending with quick mention of the “Insights Services” team, which studies how the platform is used inside Netflix. A team of people that learns about how internal teams use an internal platform to learn …
The other day we had problems with a service dying. It ran out of memory, crashing and failing to respond to all open requests. That service was running analyses of repositories, digging through their files to report on the condition of the code. It ran out of memory trying to analyze a particular large repository …
In business, we want to focus on our core domain, and let everything else be “good enough.” We need accounting, payroll, travel. But we don’t need those to be special if our core business is software for hospitals. As developers, we want to focus on changing our software, because that is our core work. We …
We build our software in a particular world, a world of technologies that we link together. We choose a programming system (language, runtime, framework), libraries, and environment. We integrate components: databases, logging, and many different services. Perhaps we built it on Java 8 running on VMs in our datacenter, connecting to a proprietary queuing service …
When you have a common piece of functionality to share between two apps, do you make a library for them to share, or break out a service? The biggest difference between publishing a library or operating a service is: who controls the pace of change. If you publish a library for people to use, you …
Avdi Grimm describes how the book Vehicles illustrates how simple parts can compose a very complex system. Another example is Conway’s Game of Life: a nice organized grid, uniform time steps, and four tiny rules. These simple pieces combine to make all kinds of wild patterns, and even look alive! These systems are complex: hard …
A Swede, on American Football: “Are there any rules? It looks like they stand in two lines, someone throws the ball backwards, and then it’s a big pile.” Me: “141 pages, last I checked. It takes a lot of rules to look like there aren’t any.” Later, people talked about error messages. There are so …
Karl Popper defines rationality as: basing beliefs on logical arguments and evidence. Irrationality is everything else. He also defines comprehensive rationality as: only logical arguments and evidence are valid basis for belief. But this belief itself can only be accepted by choice or faith, so comprehensive rationality is self-contradictory. It also excludes a lot of …
Here’s a lovely graphic from the folks at Intercom. It describes the difference between what companies sell and what people buy. We don’t want the tool, we want what we can do with the tool. Take it further – maybe what that skateboarder really wants is: the high fives at the end. Our accomplishments feel …