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Frosgren comes off like a newb, because they equate home-rolling with downtime and being embarrassed explaining to your customer what you do. When I home-roll

Frosgren comes off like a newb, because they equate home-rolling with downtime and being embarrassed explaining to your customer what you do. When I home-roll I have less downtime usually than relying on a vendor solution. But I have been doing this a very long time so maybe it is an unfair comparison; of course, I’m not so gauche that I am prefixing Dr in front of my name on Twitter.

mooreds 3y ago
> Frosgren seems like a newb She co-authored Accelerate: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339 https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Techno... . She is also currently at Microsoft Research and was previously at Google and GitHub. This may be a hot take you disagree with, but she's no newbie. I took her point to be "make sure anything you build is a lot better than anything you can buy, because there are a lot of unexpected expenses in building".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  Co-author means they could have been carried. I have worked at those companies and they were not meritocracies. I’ll add “if you are inexperienced” to that quote and agree wholeheartedly.
  - mooreds 3y ago
    How about being the lead author on all these papers? https://nicolefv.com/research https://nicolefv.com/research I haven't read any of them, nor done a google scholar search to see how many were cited, but it sure looks impressive to me. > I’ll add “if you are inexperienced” to that quote and agree wholeheartedly. 100% agree that experience matters and can teach you when to ignore rules of thumb such as "prefer buying to building." But I've seen experienced developers succumb to the siren call of building their own, say, database pool, when they should not have.
- toast0 3y ago
  > "make sure anything you build is a lot better than anything you can buy, because there are a lot of unexpected expenses in building". The same thing works the other way as make sure anything you buy is a lot better than anything you can build, because there are a lot of unexpected expenses in buying". Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but when the software I'm using, bought or built, goes wrong, my customers are mad at me, and look towards me to fix it. I might get sympathy if I claim it's a vendor problem, but they still want the problem fixed. The vendor may or may not be willing or able to fix the problem in a reasonable amount of time, regardless of if they're being paid or not. My philosophy is not necessarily to avoid using outside software, but to be careful about what to use, because at the end of the day, I need to support the whole system, not just the parts I write.
- throw9away6 3y ago
  That’s true but the lifetime costs of buying can be immense. On a home built solution you can maintain it for 30 years or more, on an off the shelf solution you may have had to rebuild and re customize 6+ times maybe even switch vendors
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  Maybe we are talking about two different things. 1) vendor-managed vs self-managed and 2) established implementations vs greenfield implementations.
brokenbyclouds 3y ago
This is the equivalent of a first year physics student saying Einstein comes off like a newb. Nicole Forsgren is legit.
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  Fair enough! Maybe Twitter is just terrible for conveying meaning.

mooreds 3y ago

> Frosgren seems like a newb She co-authored Accelerate: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339 https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Techno... . She is also currently at Microsoft Research and was previously at Google and GitHub. This may be a hot take you disagree with, but she's no newbie. I took her point to be "make sure anything you build is a lot better than anything you can buy, because there are a lot of unexpected expenses in building".

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
birdyrooster 3y ago
Co-author means they could have been carried. I have worked at those companies and they were not meritocracies. I’ll add “if you are inexperienced” to that quote and agree wholeheartedly.
- mooreds 3y ago
  How about being the lead author on all these papers? https://nicolefv.com/research https://nicolefv.com/research I haven't read any of them, nor done a google scholar search to see how many were cited, but it sure looks impressive to me. > I’ll add “if you are inexperienced” to that quote and agree wholeheartedly. 100% agree that experience matters and can teach you when to ignore rules of thumb such as "prefer buying to building." But I've seen experienced developers succumb to the siren call of building their own, say, database pool, when they should not have.
toast0 3y ago
> "make sure anything you build is a lot better than anything you can buy, because there are a lot of unexpected expenses in building". The same thing works the other way as make sure anything you buy is a lot better than anything you can build, because there are a lot of unexpected expenses in buying". Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but when the software I'm using, bought or built, goes wrong, my customers are mad at me, and look towards me to fix it. I might get sympathy if I claim it's a vendor problem, but they still want the problem fixed. The vendor may or may not be willing or able to fix the problem in a reasonable amount of time, regardless of if they're being paid or not. My philosophy is not necessarily to avoid using outside software, but to be careful about what to use, because at the end of the day, I need to support the whole system, not just the parts I write.
throw9away6 3y ago
That’s true but the lifetime costs of buying can be immense. On a home built solution you can maintain it for 30 years or more, on an off the shelf solution you may have had to rebuild and re customize 6+ times maybe even switch vendors
birdyrooster 3y ago
Maybe we are talking about two different things. 1) vendor-managed vs self-managed and 2) established implementations vs greenfield implementations.

brokenbyclouds 3y ago

This is the equivalent of a first year physics student saying Einstein comes off like a newb. Nicole Forsgren is legit.

birdyrooster 3y ago
Fair enough! Maybe Twitter is just terrible for conveying meaning.