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I'm frequently surprised by how little most software engineers know about IT, infrastructure, or hardware. The floor for basic familiarity outside of support is

I'm frequently surprised by how little most software engineers know about IT, infrastructure, or hardware. The floor for basic familiarity outside of support is shockingly low. I started as a BSD/Linux systems programmer / sysadmin, which required a working knowledge of infrastructure. Lack of ubiquitous resources meant higher stakes for correctness of work for the "whole stack". Now, there are as many abstraction and translation layers between the "code" and the hardware as people can come up with, despite there being excellent native tools (albeit, not sold by a vendor). It's not worse or wrong, as long as you can afford it, but despite working on PaaS and IaaS up until a few years ago, I still don't understand why so many seem allergic to fundamental auxiliary skill sets like administration.

tracker1 2y ago
Devil's Advocate answer... why should someone creating a web based application ui care about the underlying operating system it's running on? I daily drive Linux personally, but TBH, for the most part, I don't care about a lot of the underlying details when working on a project, and I do care more than most. Even for stuff I deploy, my preference is a pretty bare host OS, and just using Caddy + Docker to deploy and reverse-proxy applications. It works fine at the small scale, and you can vertically scale a lot. But I'm not sure I would take that approach for a lot of various applications. It really just depends.
- herpdyderp 2y ago
  Honestly I think it's rather beautiful how low the barrier to entry is for throwing a fully-functioning web app up on the internet.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    I have to agree... I really find it hard to believe that AWS themselves haven't invested more into creating a similar UX in house. I do hope that the likes of Vercel, AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers and others start to align more from a developer perspective. I know hono.dev has worked to smooth over some of the edges a bit. I'm also hoping to see similar efforts for other developer toolkits, I know there's several out there, but nice to see all the same. I think there may be some strides with WASM in the future too. shuttle.rs definitely looks interesting.
- codegeek 2y ago
  No one is saying don't use these expensive services. My argument is that most applications don't need them and people do it anyway. It works well for a while and then suddenly you get an email saying your bill is going up 1000%. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Vercel type services are not necessarily the right answer in many cases just because it is easy to start with.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    Most applications don't need more than them either. It's also easy enough to migrate off to self-hosted docker behind a load balancer if you need that as a stop-gap.

tracker1 2y ago

Devil's Advocate answer... why should someone creating a web based application ui care about the underlying operating system it's running on? I daily drive Linux personally, but TBH, for the most part, I don't care about a lot of the underlying details when working on a project, and I do care more than most. Even for stuff I deploy, my preference is a pretty bare host OS, and just using Caddy + Docker to deploy and reverse-proxy applications. It works fine at the small scale, and you can vertically scale a lot. But I'm not sure I would take that approach for a lot of various applications. It really just depends.

herpdyderp 2y ago
Honestly I think it's rather beautiful how low the barrier to entry is for throwing a fully-functioning web app up on the internet.
- tracker1 2y ago
  I have to agree... I really find it hard to believe that AWS themselves haven't invested more into creating a similar UX in house. I do hope that the likes of Vercel, AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers and others start to align more from a developer perspective. I know hono.dev has worked to smooth over some of the edges a bit. I'm also hoping to see similar efforts for other developer toolkits, I know there's several out there, but nice to see all the same. I think there may be some strides with WASM in the future too. shuttle.rs definitely looks interesting.
codegeek 2y ago
No one is saying don't use these expensive services. My argument is that most applications don't need them and people do it anyway. It works well for a while and then suddenly you get an email saying your bill is going up 1000%. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Vercel type services are not necessarily the right answer in many cases just because it is easy to start with.
- tracker1 2y ago
  Most applications don't need more than them either. It's also easy enough to migrate off to self-hosted docker behind a load balancer if you need that as a stop-gap.