3 ms·

When I was in school I had an optional requirement. You had to take one out of 2 or 3 classes to graduate. That was compiler design, which was getting terrible

When I was in school I had an optional requirement. You had to take one out of 2 or 3 classes to graduate. That was compiler design, which was getting terrible reviews from my peers who were taking it the semester before me, or distributed computing. Might have been a third but if so it was unmemorable. So I took distributed computing. Which ended up being one of the four classes that satisfied the 80/20 rule for my college education. Quite recently I started asking coworkers if they took such a class and was shocked to learn how many not only didn’t take it, but could not even recall it being an option at their school. What? I can understand it being rare in the 90’s but the 00’s and on were paying attention to horizontal scaling, and the 2020’s are rotten with it distributed computing concerns. How… why… I don’t understand how we got here.

withinboredom 2y ago
So many people I work with don't "get" distributed systems and how they interplay and cause problems. Most people don't even know that the ORDER you take potentially competing (distributed) locks even matters -- which is super important if you have different teams taking the same locks in different services! The article is well written, but they still have a lot of problems to solve.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I went too far the other way. Concurrent things just fit my brain so well that I created systems that made my coworkers have to ask for help. One that still sticks in my mind after all these years wanted to ask me to knock it off but lacked the technical chops to make it a demand. But I could read between the lines. He was part of my process of coming around to interpreting all questions as feedback. There’s about 20% of reasonable designs that get you 80% of your potential, and I’m a world with multiple unrelated work loads running in parallel, most incidental inefficiencies are papered over by multitasking. The problem is that cloud computing is actively flouting a lot of this knowledge and then charging us a premium for pretending that a bunch of the Fallacies don’t exist. The hangover is going to be spectacular when it hits.
  - withinboredom 2y ago
    > The hangover is going to be spectacular when it hits. I'm honestly looking forward to it. We constantly deal with abstractions until they break and we are forced to dive into the concrete. That can be painful, but it (usually) results in a better world to live in.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      Cloud will come back in your lifetime and maybe mine. Everything in software is cycles and epicycles. Hyperscaler hardware is basically a supercomputer without the fancy proprietary control software, which is third party now.

withinboredom 2y ago

So many people I work with don't "get" distributed systems and how they interplay and cause problems. Most people don't even know that the ORDER you take potentially competing (distributed) locks even matters -- which is super important if you have different teams taking the same locks in different services! The article is well written, but they still have a lot of problems to solve.

hinkley 2y ago
I went too far the other way. Concurrent things just fit my brain so well that I created systems that made my coworkers have to ask for help. One that still sticks in my mind after all these years wanted to ask me to knock it off but lacked the technical chops to make it a demand. But I could read between the lines. He was part of my process of coming around to interpreting all questions as feedback. There’s about 20% of reasonable designs that get you 80% of your potential, and I’m a world with multiple unrelated work loads running in parallel, most incidental inefficiencies are papered over by multitasking. The problem is that cloud computing is actively flouting a lot of this knowledge and then charging us a premium for pretending that a bunch of the Fallacies don’t exist. The hangover is going to be spectacular when it hits.
- withinboredom 2y ago
  > The hangover is going to be spectacular when it hits. I'm honestly looking forward to it. We constantly deal with abstractions until they break and we are forced to dive into the concrete. That can be painful, but it (usually) results in a better world to live in.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Cloud will come back in your lifetime and maybe mine. Everything in software is cycles and epicycles. Hyperscaler hardware is basically a supercomputer without the fancy proprietary control software, which is third party now.