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> I make money from porting people off of poor technical choices onto solid ones So it was successful enough for long enough to get them to the point where so

> I make money from porting people off of poor technical choices onto solid ones So it was successful enough for long enough to get them to the point where someone cared about optimizing and paid you to come in, right? I don't see how you are disproving the article's argument that this is a great way to prototype ideas or get a first version of the product out there.

rat9988 4y ago
"So it was successful enough for long enough " Which doesn't necessarily make it a good choice at any point. It just says it wasn't enough of a bad technical choice to make the product sink.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  OK, sure, it's not ironclad proof that it was the right decision. But it's certainly not proof it was the wrong decision when it was made.
  - namaria 4y ago
    "It works and makes money" is at the root of so much shoddy workmanship in software I think you're making a different point than what you're trying to.
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      The argument of TFA is that starting with serverless and evolving away from it bit by bit as it is revealed to be necessary is a sound strategy most of the time. Whatever you may think of that argument, “I have been hired to optimize projects built using serverless and get them off of it” is not a rebuttal.
      - namaria 4y ago
        Thanks for rehashing how this thread got started for me?
        emodendroket 4y ago
        What is this different point you think I’m making then?
        namaria 4y ago
        >this is a great way to prototype ideas or get a first version of the product out there As long as it works and makes money it excuses shoddiness. Publishing a draft to fish for revenue is the reason we have so much poor software running out there. After it's in production, you will not be able to make a business case to re-make it right.
        emodendroket 4y ago
        Apparently you will since the other guy in this thread has made this a specialization.
    - re-thc 4y ago
      This has nothing to do with software. Same applies for things like buildings where the developers get away with so many defects even after people pay huge $$$ for it.
jpgvm 4y ago
My opinion from doing both these ports and greenfield is this: None of the tools that say they help you move faster matter after the first 3 months. It's true they take less code and pieces to get started with. No k8s manifests, no Dockerfiles (usually) but if you don't hate your future self you will still use IaC to create the API Gateways/function contexts/DynamoDB/whatever, so you will still be dicking around with at least one of Terraform/Pulumi/similar. The thing is the setup cost of a traditional lang + pg + k8s setup amortised over 3 months is essentially nothing and yet you have a setup that will last you effectively forever. If your company wasn't going to die because of being a few days slower in that initial 3 month period you have came out ahead. You have a forever architecture and you avoided a whole bunch of costs and technical debt in the process. Maybe the calculus is different if you don't have the same depth of infrastructure experience I do but for me it's obvious this is a faster and better way of delivering a prototype that gives it proper room to grow into production software.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I am more of a generalist than you are but I have worked with a Kubernetes setup and I've also worked with going all-in on Lambda and other AWS services managed by CDK and I don't share your intuition. Besides the initial setup, the former also has other ongoing maintenance things that are harder to deal with. It does give you more flexibility if whatever you're doing isn't a good fit for those tools, though (though obviously nothing stops you from provisioning EC2 instances or whatever through other tools).
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I have a hard time imagining anyone doing anything non trivial with CDK and walking away happy.
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      Why? Do you have something specific to say about why you dislike it? I think it’s pretty good.
Aeolun 4y ago
If you consider building your service that should take 3000 man hours to build in 300k instead, overspending by a factor if a 100, and then still succeeding, then yeah, you could consider that a success. I’d consider it a massive, massive waste.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I have no idea what you’re arguing with this one.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    You can build exactly the same application even if you throw different amounts of money at it. Large corpo spends 2M on a CRUD app and is happy with the result (e.g. consider it a success). Another organisation (with more skilled people) builds exactly the same thing for just 50K, and also consider it a success. The fact that it’s a success doesn’t mean that it wasn’t silly. Sorry kind of lost track of the original thread here too.

rat9988 4y ago

"So it was successful enough for long enough " Which doesn't necessarily make it a good choice at any point. It just says it wasn't enough of a bad technical choice to make the product sink.

emodendroket 4y ago
OK, sure, it's not ironclad proof that it was the right decision. But it's certainly not proof it was the wrong decision when it was made.
- namaria 4y ago
  "It works and makes money" is at the root of so much shoddy workmanship in software I think you're making a different point than what you're trying to.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    The argument of TFA is that starting with serverless and evolving away from it bit by bit as it is revealed to be necessary is a sound strategy most of the time. Whatever you may think of that argument, “I have been hired to optimize projects built using serverless and get them off of it” is not a rebuttal.
    - namaria 4y ago
      Thanks for rehashing how this thread got started for me?
      - emodendroket 4y ago
        What is this different point you think I’m making then?
        namaria 4y ago
        >this is a great way to prototype ideas or get a first version of the product out there As long as it works and makes money it excuses shoddiness. Publishing a draft to fish for revenue is the reason we have so much poor software running out there. After it's in production, you will not be able to make a business case to re-make it right.
        emodendroket 4y ago
        Apparently you will since the other guy in this thread has made this a specialization.
  - re-thc 4y ago
    This has nothing to do with software. Same applies for things like buildings where the developers get away with so many defects even after people pay huge $$$ for it.

jpgvm 4y ago

My opinion from doing both these ports and greenfield is this: None of the tools that say they help you move faster matter after the first 3 months. It's true they take less code and pieces to get started with. No k8s manifests, no Dockerfiles (usually) but if you don't hate your future self you will still use IaC to create the API Gateways/function contexts/DynamoDB/whatever, so you will still be dicking around with at least one of Terraform/Pulumi/similar. The thing is the setup cost of a traditional lang + pg + k8s setup amortised over 3 months is essentially nothing and yet you have a setup that will last you effectively forever. If your company wasn't going to die because of being a few days slower in that initial 3 month period you have came out ahead. You have a forever architecture and you avoided a whole bunch of costs and technical debt in the process. Maybe the calculus is different if you don't have the same depth of infrastructure experience I do but for me it's obvious this is a faster and better way of delivering a prototype that gives it proper room to grow into production software.

emodendroket 4y ago
I am more of a generalist than you are but I have worked with a Kubernetes setup and I've also worked with going all-in on Lambda and other AWS services managed by CDK and I don't share your intuition. Besides the initial setup, the former also has other ongoing maintenance things that are harder to deal with. It does give you more flexibility if whatever you're doing isn't a good fit for those tools, though (though obviously nothing stops you from provisioning EC2 instances or whatever through other tools).
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I have a hard time imagining anyone doing anything non trivial with CDK and walking away happy.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    Why? Do you have something specific to say about why you dislike it? I think it’s pretty good.

Aeolun 4y ago

If you consider building your service that should take 3000 man hours to build in 300k instead, overspending by a factor if a 100, and then still succeeding, then yeah, you could consider that a success. I’d consider it a massive, massive waste.

emodendroket 4y ago
I have no idea what you’re arguing with this one.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  You can build exactly the same application even if you throw different amounts of money at it. Large corpo spends 2M on a CRUD app and is happy with the result (e.g. consider it a success). Another organisation (with more skilled people) builds exactly the same thing for just 50K, and also consider it a success. The fact that it’s a success doesn’t mean that it wasn’t silly. Sorry kind of lost track of the original thread here too.