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Your thinking reminds me of the work of a friend of mine. He's an AWS consultant and builds thing like AWS thinks you should. Some of the things he comes up wit
by mrweasel 3y ago
Your thinking reminds me of the work of a friend of mine. He's an AWS consultant and builds thing like AWS thinks you should. Some of the things he comes up with, chaining services together, with a sprinkle of lambda functions, it's Rube Goldberg machines all the way down.
A user logs in to a javascript app, hosted in an S3 bucket, authentication is handled by Cognito, the user gets a upload form, once their files is uploaded to S3, a lambda triggers an ECS container to spin up, some processing, output is sent to SQS where a service hosted on EKS picks up the processed data .... AND SO ON.
Rube Goldberg machines, all of it.
- monktastic1 3y agoExactly the term I had in mind: Rube Goldberg. And it gets so much worse than the examples you've given. Trying to shoehorn all the leaky abstractions together across the dozens or hundreds of pieces of technology I use every day from different vendors and open-source projects, with each interaction having hundreds of arcane failure modes, is absolutely soul-sucking. I'm impressed by the people who still do it, regardless of how much they earn for doing so.
- marcosdumay 3y ago> it's Rube Goldberg machines all the way down On another context, you have some processed data on the backend, and an infinitely customizable software system on the frontend... How do you keep them both in sync? And yeah, it is by converting your data into a programing language; parsing it again; resolving incompatibilities; turning it into the presentation language; letting the user interact with the presentation representation; converting it back into the programing language; sending it back into the backend... But then you don't want a round trip on every single interaction, so you convert your backend code into the frontend language, so it deals directly with the presentation code... and it goes on. Oh, on the backend side you have an application and a data layer, both using different languages and data representation; so you do all that dance again there... Oh, and now we want several independent layers between those too, so be prepared to do all of that again and again. At some point we decided on the wrong abstractions for our mainstream architectures.
- dennis_jeeves1 3y agoMany developers have this Rube Goldberg syndrome and carry this as a badge of honor.
- makz 3y agoModern civilisation is just a giant Rube Goldberg machine made of smaller Rube Goldberg machines which in turn…