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Going through photos of my European trip, putting descriptions on them. Also updating my journal at the same time. I wish Day One supported photo captions. I have to settle for italic text below the photo if I want to add one. It’s left justified and just doesn’t look right.
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🔗 XML is the future - Bite code!
I wanted to write something about fads in the software development industry when the post about Amazon Prime Video moving away from micro-services back to monoliths was making the rounds. A lot of the motivation towards micro-services can be traced back to Amazon’s preaching about them being the best way to architect scalable software. Having a team from Amazon saying “micro-services didn’t work; we went back to a monolith and it was more scalable and cheaper to run” is, frankly, a bit like the Pope renouncing his Catholic faith.
I didn’t say anything at the time as doing so seemed like jumping on the fad wagon along with everyone else, but I have to agree with this article that this following along with the crowd is quite pervasive in the circuits I travel in. I did witness the tail end of the XML fad when I first started working. My first job had all the good stuff: XML for data and configuration, XSLT to render HTML and to ingest HL71, XForms for customisable forms. We may have used XSD somewhere as well. Good thing we stopped short of SOAP.
The whole feeling that XML was the answer to any problem was quite pervasive, and with only a few evangelists, it was enough to drive the team in a particular direction. And I wish I could say that I was above it all, but that would be a lie. I drank the cool-aid like many others about the virtues of XML.
But here lies the seductive thing about these technology fads: they’re not without their merits. There were cases where XML was the answer, just like there are cases where micro-services are. The trap is assuming that just because it worked before, it would work again, 100% of the time in fact, even if the problem is different. After all, Amazon or whatever is using it, and they’re successful. And you do want to see this project succeed, right? Especially when we’re pouring all this money into it and your job is on the line, hmm?
Thus, teams are using micro-services, Kubernetes, 50 different middleware and sidecar containers, and pages and pages of configuration to build a service where the total amount of data can be loaded into an SQLite3 database2. And so it goes.
So we’ll see what would come of it all. I hope there is a move away from micro-services back to simpler forms of software designs; one where the architecture can fit entirely in one’s head. Of course, just as this article says, they’ll probably be an overcorrection, and a whole set of new problems arise when micro-services are ditched in favour of monoliths. I only hope that, should teams decide to do this, they do so with both eyes open and avoid the pitfalls these fads can lay for them.
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Feature request for Micro.blog: have a way to recall a post entered into the Share Sheet when a user dismisses it. I wrote quite a lengthy post in one, and I lost it all when I accidently dismissed the Share Sheet. Doing that doesn’t feel great. 🙁
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Best number plate seen on an electric car to date: CHGME. 🔋
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I’m liking the new source browser in GitHub. Saves a decent amount of time for things like libraries where I just want to read the source. No more need for checking it out to a temp directory and opening it in an IDE just to get the code indexed.
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Had the opportunity to see our new office today. It’s fabulous. Converted factory with exposed brick work gives it a startup feel. Lots of natural light as well. But the best thing is the commute: the small tram ride from Southern Cross is miles better than the bus. Looking forward to moving there.
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The local Woolworths has rolled out what I believe to be E Ink price tags. I was hoping to start seeing E Ink used for things like this. The technology is perfect for this use case.
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It’s a little frustrating seeing code examples that don’t explain what the example is trying to demonstrate. I found an example for an oauth2 Go library but there’s nothing about what it’s an example of. Is it of an authentication server? A resource server? What’s it demonstrating?
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And just like that, my ChatGTP luck has run out. Asked it to generate some example code this morning, and what it produced couldn’t compile and misses a few key steps in the logic. I guess it won’t be doing my job anytime soon (I still find it really useful though).
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A lawsuit, the last refuge of a scoundrel.
(With apologies to the Simpsons).
P.S. Like the new design of Birchtree.
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🔗 Reddit mods fear spam overload as BotDefense leaves “antagonistic” Reddit
I wonder if anyone at Reddit’s C suite has ever been a moderator. That this API fisaco is affecting the tools that mods use to keep the community spam free and happy should give them pause. That they don’t care is an indication as to how detatched they are from those “on the ground”.
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One last trip-related photo: the pseudo souvenir mug I bought. It’s a “pseudo souvenir” in that I didn’t get it overseas1. I saw mugs like this while I was in Venice, found myself wanting one after I left, so I got one from Red Bubble. It arrived at my house this Monday… but let’s pretend I bought it home myself. 🤫
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Well, I did buy it while I was overseas, and it probably originated from overseas, but I didn’t bring it home with me. ↩︎
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Code First, Tests After
Still doing the code first, tests after at work and I’m really starting to see the benefits from it. Test driven development is fine, but most of our recent issues — excess logging or errors that are false positives — have nothing to do with buggy business logic. It’s true that you can catch these in unit tests (although I find them to be the worst possible tests to write) but I think you gain a lot more just from launching the application and seeing it run. Continue reading →
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A Lisp-based Evans Wrapper
I wanted an excuse to try out this Lisp-like embedded language Go library that was featured in Golang Weekly. Found one today when I was using Evans to test a gRPC endpoint and I wanted a way to automate it. Hacked up something in 30 minutes which takes a method name and a Lisp structure, converts it to JSON and uses Evans to send it as a gRPC message. As the afternoon progressed, I added some facilities to send HTTP GET and POST methods with JSON request bodies, plus some facilities to set some global options. Continue reading →
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🔗 Poor man’s team bonding: recurring Slack threads
Could be a nice idea for blogs as well. Maybe for someone who’s trying to post at least once a day, but occasionally can’t think of something to write about. Not that I know anyone like that.
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I can’t say enough good things about using Dokku for deploying and running web-apps on a Linux VPS. Compared to the competition, it’s so refreshing to use. Makes deployments the easiest part of the exercise, as it should be.
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Interesting piece from the Verge about the rise and fall of Google Reader, which was killed 10 years ago. I wasn’t a big Google Reader user, and I still believe that the death of Google Reader was ultimately good for the RSS format. But I know how much people loved using it and how devastated they where when Google decided to pull the plug.
One thing that caught my eye was the executive’s comment about working on Google Reader being a waste of the engineers’ careers. Taking the comment at face value1, it doesn’t seem like a waste at all. Sure there were “only” 30 million users of Google Reader, but it’s obvious that they were passionate users of the service. And it would’ve been an honour working on something that elicit such a strong emotional response from your users, let alone being the one that started it all with the original prototype. I can’t imaging getting that same buzz by one of the thousands working on Google Search or Google+.
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I’m guessing the comment was slightly coloured by the fact that the person making it wasn’t too keen on Google Reader. ↩︎
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Finished reading: Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield 📚
I think this is one of those books you need to read a few times to internalise it, and this was my first pass. I’m also wondering to what degree this book applies to my ambitions: whether or not I really want to “turn pro”. Guess we’ll find out.
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Just set up a reading goal in Micro.blog for 2023. I kinda like how a book only counts to your goal when you write a blog post about it. A good way to keep track of what you’ve read in public.
Anyway, let’s see if I can reach the ambitious goal of finishing 5 books this year. 🙄
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Finished reading: The Song of Significance by Seth Godin 📚
An enjoyable book to read, as I expected from Seth. Will need to look out for opportunities to apply these points in practice.
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TIL you can enter a photo description in Google Photos. Select a photo, click the Info icon, and a free-text “description” field is revealed. Not super sure what the description is to be used for, but I’m hoping to use it for photo captions.
