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Reading this excellent article put me in the mind of wondering if job interviews for developer positions include enough questions about queue management. "Ben"

by Rygian 2y ago

Reading this excellent article put me in the mind of wondering if job interviews for developer positions include enough questions about queue management. "Ben" developed retries without exponential back-off, and only learned about that concept in code review. Exponential back-off should be part of any basic developer curriculum (except if that curriculum does not mention networks of any sort at all).

sim7c00 2y ago
if you have too many deeper questions you rule out a lot of eager juniors who can learn and grow on the job. its a fine balance though, but looking at the article, ben's taking his lessons and growing. thats more important i think than having someone who's some guru from the get go. everyone has things they are better or worse at, and it's really a team effort to do everythinng right. presumably someone reviewed and accepted his code, that person also didnt catch it... there's no developer who knows everything and makes all perfect code and design. its a well balanced team that can help go in that direction
- Rygian 2y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree, and realize my comment was not really clear. Any training curriculum needs to include exponential back-off as a core concept of any system-to-system interaction. Ben was let out of school without proper training. Kudos on the employer for finishing up the training that was missed earlier on.
hinkley 2y ago
However backoff without circuit-breakers is bad juju. The author asserts that circuit breakers are necessary but insufficient counter for retry storms. I'm not sure if I agree, but I don't have a solid counterargument at the moment. I think it also depends on how you think about reverse proxies. Are they a given or do you need to explicitly mention that you can cut servers or processes out of the cluster that are lagging and timing out?

by Rygian 2y ago

sim7c00 2y ago

if you have too many deeper questions you rule out a lot of eager juniors who can learn and grow on the job. its a fine balance though, but looking at the article, ben's taking his lessons and growing. thats more important i think than having someone who's some guru from the get go. everyone has things they are better or worse at, and it's really a team effort to do everythinng right. presumably someone reviewed and accepted his code, that person also didnt catch it... there's no developer who knows everything and makes all perfect code and design. its a well balanced team that can help go in that direction

Rygian 2y ago
I wholeheartedly agree, and realize my comment was not really clear. Any training curriculum needs to include exponential back-off as a core concept of any system-to-system interaction. Ben was let out of school without proper training. Kudos on the employer for finishing up the training that was missed earlier on.

hinkley 2y ago

However backoff without circuit-breakers is bad juju. The author asserts that circuit breakers are necessary but insufficient counter for retry storms. I'm not sure if I agree, but I don't have a solid counterargument at the moment. I think it also depends on how you think about reverse proxies. Are they a given or do you need to explicitly mention that you can cut servers or processes out of the cluster that are lagging and timing out?