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Software is indeed a lot like cities. But cities ain't pretty. Dig the ground and nothing looks like what's on the map. To create a new building, you need to c
by d--b 6y ago
Software is indeed a lot like cities.
But cities ain't pretty. Dig the ground and nothing looks like what's on the map. To create a new building, you need to cut a lot of plumbing and re-route it somehow.
Stuff gets old and breaks all the time, and maintenance teams are on the ground 24/7 to fix it. NYT subway is the mainframe of the city. Look at the central steam heating that's still pumping water into high rises.
Sure, you can sell a shop, and people will be able to repurpose that space to suit their needs very efficiently. But isn't that what Docker does? Provide a cookie cutter space to run an app?
But in cities, there are places where trucks can't go, where you can't park, where unplanned work happens, where the sewer floods. That's when the city 'bugs', and people need to manually intervene to fix it...
Trying to find an ideal way of running software at scale is just as utopian as building the perfect city using 'super structures'. It's a dream of the 60s that's never going to happen.
- alkonaut 6y agoMaybe a large US city is less of an ideal than say a medium sized Swiss one...
- sjm 6y agoIdeal in what sense? NYC has more than double the GDP of the entire country of Switzerland and approximately the same population.
- alkonaut 6y agoI mean in the sense of what perceived chaos or deterioration is “allowed” in a city or it’s infrastructure. E.g whether a plot can be left unbuilt or half torn down for example, and the standards which are expected of public infrastructure like roads or train stations.
- golemiprague 6y agoCities like Tokyo might be more comparabe, and much nicer than NYC in many aspects, especially the public transportation system. For a major city NY looks pretty shabby and not that nice in average.