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The allure of our industry to mime FAANG leaders might be one of the reasons we're at this stage. Most products could be safely run on simpler setups. I suspec

The allure of our industry to mime FAANG leaders might be one of the reasons we're at this stage. Most products could be safely run on simpler setups. I suspect that VendorOps and complex tools like kubernetes are favored by complexity merchants which have arisen in the past decade. It looks great on resume and gives tech leaders a false sense of achievement. Meanwhile Stackoverflow, which is arguably more important than most startups, is chugging along on dedicated machines. 1: https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-arc...

dgb23 4y ago
Software development and related things are known to have fantastic often free online resources for autodidacts. It seems like the trend in this space is to jump directly to the highest layer of abstraction. Skipping the fundamentals and point to $buzzword tools, libraries and products. You see glimpses of this in different forms. One is social media threads which ask stuff like “How much of X do I need to know to learn Y?” Where X is a fundamental, possibly very stable technology or field and Y is some tool du jour or straight up a product or service.
failbuffer 4y ago
"complexity merchants" - I love this term. It aptly describes beneficiaries of earlier IT fads. Remember UML? Remember WS-*? One could come up with a long list of technologies that were a bonanza for billing consultant hours but no so great for getting to solutions.
- switchbak 4y ago
  The debacle that was J2EE is hard to top (but I'm sure some have!). I still have battle scars from OSGi. CORBA belongs there. And perhaps even the semantic web stuff. Definitely XML!
  - 77pt77 4y ago
    SOAP, don't forget SOAP.
    - hooverd 4y ago
      SOAP is great when it works. Ingest a WSDL file and boom you've got an API client.
      - 77pt77 4y ago
        And it almost never works if you use different frameworks.
        hooverd 4y ago
        Heh, lot of emphasis on "when it works".
  - jstrebel 4y ago
    To be fair - J2EE (and its associated technologies like SOAP, XML) is a bit like alcohol. It is great when used in moderation, but gives you headaches when used excessively. XML is great - if you don't believe it, then you might be interested in the pains of parsing JSON: http://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html http://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html And don't get me started on YAML...
- flir 4y ago
  I remember architecture astronauts.

dgb23 4y ago

Software development and related things are known to have fantastic often free online resources for autodidacts. It seems like the trend in this space is to jump directly to the highest layer of abstraction. Skipping the fundamentals and point to $buzzword tools, libraries and products. You see glimpses of this in different forms. One is social media threads which ask stuff like “How much of X do I need to know to learn Y?” Where X is a fundamental, possibly very stable technology or field and Y is some tool du jour or straight up a product or service.

failbuffer 4y ago

"complexity merchants" - I love this term. It aptly describes beneficiaries of earlier IT fads. Remember UML? Remember WS-*? One could come up with a long list of technologies that were a bonanza for billing consultant hours but no so great for getting to solutions.

switchbak 4y ago
The debacle that was J2EE is hard to top (but I'm sure some have!). I still have battle scars from OSGi. CORBA belongs there. And perhaps even the semantic web stuff. Definitely XML!
- 77pt77 4y ago
  SOAP, don't forget SOAP.
  - hooverd 4y ago
    SOAP is great when it works. Ingest a WSDL file and boom you've got an API client.
    - 77pt77 4y ago
      And it almost never works if you use different frameworks.
      - hooverd 4y ago
        Heh, lot of emphasis on "when it works".
- jstrebel 4y ago
  To be fair - J2EE (and its associated technologies like SOAP, XML) is a bit like alcohol. It is great when used in moderation, but gives you headaches when used excessively. XML is great - if you don't believe it, then you might be interested in the pains of parsing JSON: http://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html http://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html And don't get me started on YAML...
flir 4y ago
I remember architecture astronauts.