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 …
At Papers We Love conference, Dr Heidi Howard described requirements for distributed consensus: Safety and Progress. In distributed consensus, multiple servers decide on some value and then report that to their clients. Safety means that the clients never learn about different values; the consensus is all correct and consistent. Progress means that clients do eventually …
We prefer simple models to complicated ones. Circles to ellipses, a single ancestor to a soup. But is that really because the simple explanation is more likely? The value of keeping assumptions to a minimum is cognitive. Philip Ball, The Tyranny of Simple Explanations Simpler theories are more useful because we can think about them …
Legacy code is software that is no longer alive in someone’s head. No person has a mental model of how it works, no one has the stories of why. This is already the common case in software systems, and it will only grow more normal. Understanding an entire piece of the system is a luxury. …
You can want something, or you can just be interested in things. On a dating site, you can decide what you want in a partner and filter people for that and message them. Or, you can find many things about people interesting, and look for any of these traits or hobbies, and ask about them. …
Some people work in a system, and some people work on a system. Like, you can be the person who washes the dishes, or the person who installs and maintains the dishwasher. You can be the person who assembles the reports every week, or the person who automates that report assembly. (Jacob Stoebel told this …