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> my impression is that we’ve gone from packaging or building an installer taking 10% of effort to cloud deployment infrastructure being 25-30% of effort, but t

> my impression is that we’ve gone from packaging or building an installer taking 10% of effort to cloud deployment infrastructure being 25-30% of effort, but that’s just one data point The old bad days of shrink-wrapped software involved installing in environments we could not control. Tbe direct costs of writing an installer and testing (the larger effort) install, upgrade, uninstall, recovering from partial installs, etc. were nothing compared to the costs of dealing with all the weirdness that could exist on a customer's machine. We're doing things like blue/green deploys and CD - things not remotely possible in that other world. And we're hooking up all kinds of monitoring and observability tooling that . . . even if we could have shipped that to customers on physical media, we'd be unable to harvest data from in those old times. I think we're spending a lot less engineering time and getting a bigger bang for the effort. I worry, though, that because software engineering has the shared professional memory of a goldfish that can always swim to an unvisited side of its bowl, we'll somehow try to repeat that pattern we've overcome.

gonzo41 4y ago
I would offer the view, that for teams flush with money, everything you said is great. But if you're a solo dev or in a small team, deployments and finding the correct balance is actually tricky to manage. Developers created a solution to the old deployment problem by abandoning it and doing something else. That problem exists and you'd think it'd just be solved now so rolling out a desktop app wasn't such a crazy pain. I worry that software engineering is building a lot of tech stacks that need active maintenance and can't really go into a classical long term support style use.
- sideshowb 4y ago
  > Developers created a solution to the old deployment problem by abandoning it and doing something else Also by shipping a standard webview and js app, if you want to go that route. But there were plenty of cross platform solutions before that, most notably java. Of course you know all that, guess I'm just trying to remind us that desktop deployment wasn't that unsolved and still isn't.

gonzo41 4y ago

I would offer the view, that for teams flush with money, everything you said is great. But if you're a solo dev or in a small team, deployments and finding the correct balance is actually tricky to manage. Developers created a solution to the old deployment problem by abandoning it and doing something else. That problem exists and you'd think it'd just be solved now so rolling out a desktop app wasn't such a crazy pain. I worry that software engineering is building a lot of tech stacks that need active maintenance and can't really go into a classical long term support style use.

sideshowb 4y ago
> Developers created a solution to the old deployment problem by abandoning it and doing something else Also by shipping a standard webview and js app, if you want to go that route. But there were plenty of cross platform solutions before that, most notably java. Of course you know all that, guess I'm just trying to remind us that desktop deployment wasn't that unsolved and still isn't.