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Why people start at the K8 end state is twofold, fashion and a lot of younger people don't look at highways and see they started out as either single lane tarma

Why people start at the K8 end state is twofold, fashion and a lot of younger people don't look at highways and see they started out as either single lane tarmac or dirt roads that were remade in place. There's a lot more talk these days about refactoring complex systems. But its really a job for senior engineers or young folk who have time for it (Like the new grads who complain about being dumped on legacy systems :) ). When you're jumping from framework to framework and shipping features, sitting back and considering things is really tricky, and the inertia to build from scratch but also have 20 years of refactored improvements delivered makes jumping on K8's and the magic that brings seem like a no brainer.

gen220 7y ago
I really, really like your metaphor of the dirt roads remade in place. It’s fascinating to look down at the sidewalk in NYC and know that it was farmland only a few centuries ago. We know the aphorisms: Rome wasn’t built in a day, but we don’t always think them through. At work, when a new person joins our team, it’s fascinating (in a non-cynical way) to hear “why are we using a dirt road here instead of a highway? Wouldn’t that be more efficient?” It’s fun to imagine the implications of such a project, and it’s a great opportunity to give perspective on the traffic flow of customers, developers, operations. Could we build a highway there? Yes. But usually, it’s a better allocation of our finite resources to do some maintenance on the existing highway. Sometimes, we actually need to take highways apart and replace them with something more informal, since their maintenance costs more than they’re worth. Something tangential this reminds me of is the concept of “Desire Lines”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path. The work of an SWE can be summed up as the identification and “improvement” of desire lines. If you build a highway, but it’s not on a desire line, you’ve just wasted a lot of energy!

gen220 7y ago

I really, really like your metaphor of the dirt roads remade in place. It’s fascinating to look down at the sidewalk in NYC and know that it was farmland only a few centuries ago. We know the aphorisms: Rome wasn’t built in a day, but we don’t always think them through. At work, when a new person joins our team, it’s fascinating (in a non-cynical way) to hear “why are we using a dirt road here instead of a highway? Wouldn’t that be more efficient?” It’s fun to imagine the implications of such a project, and it’s a great opportunity to give perspective on the traffic flow of customers, developers, operations. Could we build a highway there? Yes. But usually, it’s a better allocation of our finite resources to do some maintenance on the existing highway. Sometimes, we actually need to take highways apart and replace them with something more informal, since their maintenance costs more than they’re worth. Something tangential this reminds me of is the concept of “Desire Lines”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path. The work of an SWE can be summed up as the identification and “improvement” of desire lines. If you build a highway, but it’s not on a desire line, you’ve just wasted a lot of energy!