The “shot”:
The chaser:
I hope they receive another bath soon…
UI Fails #1, trying to find a COVID test edition
Author: Robert Harris
Cloud Skeptic #0
Split your codebase, split your teams, create a lot of opportunities for mediocre coders to grow into mediocre engineering managers, everybody was happy. Including your hardware vendor, because suddenly you needed much more hardware to run the same workloads… The feedback cycle is truly broken – testing a microservice is merely testing a cog in a machine and no guarantee that the cog will fit the machine – but we just throw more bodies at the problem because Gartner tells us this is the future.
Cees de Groot goes Back to the 70s with Serverless.
UI Fails #0
I’m going to start chronicling UI fails that I find in the wild, and marvel/despair that people paid money for this.
And…
Best for last..
And the Rule 17 Lifetime Achievement Award goes to…COBOL
The sheer age of those COBOL systems is, oddly, actually something that works in their favor. Because they’re old, they have been relentlessly debugged. When a program is first written, it inevitably has problems…But those COBOL programs that run the world? They’ve had decades for coders and users to uncover all the problems, and to fix them…They’ve been debugged more than just about any code on the planet. This idea — that older code can not only be good, but in crucial ways superior to newer code — is at odds with a lot of Silicon Valley myth making.
Legacy == Proven.
Clive Thompson on the enduring fitness and necessity of COBOL https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money
50 years of SQL
Thoughtful essay on the staying power of a simple yet powerful language, that doesn’t get reinvented every few years.
Robert, are you just holding on to SQLCMD mode?
I’ve been struggling with SSMS losing intellisense, seemingly randomly, for months now. Blowing away the local settings cache and reinstalling would help for a bit, but it kept coming back, er, going away. I was losing my serenity. Special thanks to my friend Capt’ Quacks for figuring out that intellisense and SQLCMD mode don’t play well together.
Cleverness is the Mother of Regret
Scott Locklin on the wisdom of rules 6 and 17
One of the valuable things about popular but boring languages is that the code has been traversed many times, and routine stuff you’re likely to use in production is probably well debugged… The other benefit to boring languages is people concentrate on the problem, rather than the interesting complexities of the language itself.
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/woo-for-its-own-sake/
Me trying to DevOps the week after Halloween
Time Dilation
When a developer says next week, they mean Friday. When Sales hears next week, they think Monday. Plan accordingly.
Radioactive Web Debugging
With apologies to Imagine Dragons (and everyone, really).
I’m waking up to cache and JS
I tail my log and I trace my REST
I’m breathing in the CSS
(unnecessarily long and deep breath)
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