3 ms·

Yeah, me too, but systems grew over time and grew and grew and we were using HTTP headers for all sorts of stuff. This optimization makes the situation better,

Yeah, me too, but systems grew over time and grew and grew and we were using HTTP headers for all sorts of stuff. This optimization makes the situation better, but the solution (which is underway) is to use a different mechanism for IPC and get rid of the use of HTTP headers completely.

DamonHD 2y ago
And when that happy day dawns, slightly sadly, this nice optimisation will evaporate!
- jgrahamc 2y ago
  Maybe the real treasure was the optimizations we made and discarded along the way.
  - DamonHD 2y ago
    Indeed. I am very happy with some of the tricks that I developed (speeding up, and indeed allowing, Solaris C++ linking by prefiltering on MD5 hashes of canonicalised .o files -> nm, anyone?) even though they were lost without trace (yep, Lehman Brothers, where are my Imakefiles now?)...
    - jkaptur 2y ago
      They're probably as critical as ever at Barclays :)
      - DamonHD 2y ago
        I really hope not, given that that very old Solaris compiler should have been laid to rest many many years ago. Yes, some of my stuff had kinda made it into BarCap (even onto my desktop dev machine!) when I turned up there later, and even some at Nomura when I rocked up there again IIRC!
        alohashirt99 2y ago
        I recall working at a broker/dealer on Broadway where a curious sysadmin noticed a power cord that underneath an internal wall that fenced off "dead space." Said space turned out to contain a "forgotten" minicomputer living just outside a machine room. I recall returning to a bank and discovering that router and load balancer admin passwords hadn't changed in seven years..
  - Twirrim 2y ago
    My likely overly cynical concern here is that this suggests trie-hard will soon end up abandoned, as you're making it sound like it is a stop-gap solution for you.
throwaway77385 2y ago
For anyone not in the loop, the above poster (JGC) is Cloudflare's CTO himself :)
amluto 2y ago
I’m certainly familiar with systems growing over time and outgrowing their original schema. Is this the same phenomenon that resulted in Cloudflare Tunnels apparently being domain names? Or why domains that are proxied by Cloudflare show up as “CNAME” in the DNS panel? (The latter one seems extra strange — wasn’t the reverse proxy service the very first service that Cloudflare offered? There must be some history here.)
- hinkley 2y ago
  All new products are full of scaffolding that has to be removed when robustness becomes a higher priority than existence. Where we fail is not calling it that. Instead we just call some code “good” while our thicker skinned coworkers call the rest “fine”. It’s not fine. I don’t want to be working overtime the week of thanksgiving because you can’t think past the horizon.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - gmueckl 2y ago
    There is a very fine line between "good enough" and "not good enough" in any product beyond a certain complexity. Finding the pieces that cross that line can be hard and improving "good enough" parts is (sadly) mostly a waste of time in commercial settings.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      You have to backdate starting a project so it happens before things stop being good enough. And take into account bad estimates and the five other deadlines between then and now. Often it’s better to clean as you go. If you have the time and the inclination, shore up one of the least good enough things. It’s not unheard of to open up new feature sets via refactoring. Something that previously would have taken an “impossible” amount of time now becomes profitable, not just possible.
      - 2y ago
alex_suzuki 2y ago
You chiming in on this post makes me slightly bitter at having gone with CloudFront (I have everything on AWS so it seemed the obvious choice) instead of Cloudflare.

DamonHD 2y ago

And when that happy day dawns, slightly sadly, this nice optimisation will evaporate!

jgrahamc 2y ago
Maybe the real treasure was the optimizations we made and discarded along the way.
- DamonHD 2y ago
  Indeed. I am very happy with some of the tricks that I developed (speeding up, and indeed allowing, Solaris C++ linking by prefiltering on MD5 hashes of canonicalised .o files -> nm, anyone?) even though they were lost without trace (yep, Lehman Brothers, where are my Imakefiles now?)...
  - jkaptur 2y ago
    They're probably as critical as ever at Barclays :)
    - DamonHD 2y ago
      I really hope not, given that that very old Solaris compiler should have been laid to rest many many years ago. Yes, some of my stuff had kinda made it into BarCap (even onto my desktop dev machine!) when I turned up there later, and even some at Nomura when I rocked up there again IIRC!
      - alohashirt99 2y ago
        I recall working at a broker/dealer on Broadway where a curious sysadmin noticed a power cord that underneath an internal wall that fenced off "dead space." Said space turned out to contain a "forgotten" minicomputer living just outside a machine room. I recall returning to a bank and discovering that router and load balancer admin passwords hadn't changed in seven years..
- Twirrim 2y ago
  My likely overly cynical concern here is that this suggests trie-hard will soon end up abandoned, as you're making it sound like it is a stop-gap solution for you.

throwaway77385 2y ago

For anyone not in the loop, the above poster (JGC) is Cloudflare's CTO himself :)

amluto 2y ago

I’m certainly familiar with systems growing over time and outgrowing their original schema. Is this the same phenomenon that resulted in Cloudflare Tunnels apparently being domain names? Or why domains that are proxied by Cloudflare show up as “CNAME” in the DNS panel? (The latter one seems extra strange — wasn’t the reverse proxy service the very first service that Cloudflare offered? There must be some history here.)

hinkley 2y ago
All new products are full of scaffolding that has to be removed when robustness becomes a higher priority than existence. Where we fail is not calling it that. Instead we just call some code “good” while our thicker skinned coworkers call the rest “fine”. It’s not fine. I don’t want to be working overtime the week of thanksgiving because you can’t think past the horizon.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gmueckl 2y ago
  There is a very fine line between "good enough" and "not good enough" in any product beyond a certain complexity. Finding the pieces that cross that line can be hard and improving "good enough" parts is (sadly) mostly a waste of time in commercial settings.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    You have to backdate starting a project so it happens before things stop being good enough. And take into account bad estimates and the five other deadlines between then and now. Often it’s better to clean as you go. If you have the time and the inclination, shore up one of the least good enough things. It’s not unheard of to open up new feature sets via refactoring. Something that previously would have taken an “impossible” amount of time now becomes profitable, not just possible.
    - 2y ago

alex_suzuki 2y ago

You chiming in on this post makes me slightly bitter at having gone with CloudFront (I have everything on AWS so it seemed the obvious choice) instead of Cloudflare.