dub

9 ms·

31.
by dub 4y ago
I tried working at a company with non-technical founders and leadership. I'd never do it again. It was like a poison when upper management didn't know how to hire competent engineering leaders. It seeps down into middle management
32.
by dub 4y ago
My wish for configuration languages is that as an industry we continue to adopt scriptable build systems like Bazel that make it easy to transform human-written configuration into machine-readable configuration during compile time. Want com
33.
by dub 4y ago
Agreed about having SRE fully integrated into feature teams in terms of day-to-day work, seating charts, team building events, etc. From a management perspective I think it still makes sense for SRE to have a different reporting structure.
34.
by dub 4y ago
Scalable relational storage is relatively new to industry consciousness (outside of Google, where Spanner is used for nearly everything). Spanner and Vitess existed at Google in the early 2010s. It was mid-to-late 2010s before CockroachDB,
35.
by dub 4y ago
Horizontally scalable data storage is generally available these days (cockroach, tidb, vitess, etc.) Rearchitecting from unscalable to scalable data storage is notoriously difficult and expensive. Even the most famously competent companies
36.
by dub 4y ago
Performance reviews in corporate culture often have a "what have you done for me lately?" mindset. If you're senior or staff and haven't launched anything exciting lately, middle management might become less interested i
37.
by dub 4y ago
Another option for clearing tape backups is to throw away the encryption keys, as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejBncCrlAqc mentions
38.
by dub 4y ago
Generally user data deletion happens in multiple phases for large companies that care about both compliance and user experience. For example, if you delete an email or document on Google it moves to the "Trash" folder for 30 days.
39.
by dub 5y ago
One use case for password managers is account sharing among multiple people. Password managers make more money if they support that use case, which provides legitimate value in companies and families
40.
by dub 5y ago
It's strictly more complex without much additional benefit. To have zero-trust random blob tracking you'd still need public key infrastructure, and you'd have a system which is overall more complex and has more ways to break
41.
by dub 5y ago
Have you ever had your credentials to a decentralized service stolen by a keylogger and realized that you will never, ever, under any circumstances regain control and there's no one you can talk to and nothing you can do about it? Dece
42.
by dub 5y ago
It's no accident that the Google Open Source Security Team is sponsor of reproducible-builds.org: they'd like to get the open source world up to speed with best practices that have been applied widely internally at Google for well
43.
by dub 5y ago
NFTs also get stolen. For example: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjb4nq/investor-says-bored-a...
44.
by dub 5y ago
When people choose Vitess over Cockroach, TiDB, etc., it's usually not because they have any reason to think Cockroach wouldn't work. Vitess is just a far simpler, safer, more predictable migration if you're already using mys
45.
by dub 5y ago
There are a variety of generic DSLs for encoding configuration concisely with composability, functions, custom validation, etc. Some examples would be jsonnet, dhall, and cue. If the configuration needs to be transformed into a more compute
46.
by dub 5y ago
Agreed that it's a result of not having people experienced with building systems at scale. That's not a technical choice since the person writing code wasn't aware of the options, so it's a business choice. How good of a
47.
by dub 5y ago
Seems like you feel that establishing data access patterns that have the possibility of scaling up to 100x more users requires an additional 3 weeks of initial developer time I'm not sure I agree that an engineer experienced in buildi
48.
by dub 5y ago
A concrete example might be choosing a database and schema for a public-facing product with the hope that it'll become popular but with no architectural contingency plan whatsoever for how to scale up that data storage in the event of
49.
by dub 5y ago
Much of the time "technical debt" seems to be a euphemism for bad engineering The leaning Millennium Tower in SF cost over >$100m dollars to fix. We call that a mistake or an oversight, not "engineering debt" In softw
50.
by dub 6y ago
If the API takes a cursor and a number of items to fetch, the idea of a "page" or how large it is exists entirely on the client. You can fetch 40 results in one query and say it corresponds to the next four "pages", if y
51.
by dub 6y ago
Building google _was_ research. It grew out of a PhD thesis. There are publicly available papers describing lots of the infrastructure innovations along the way (GFS, bigtable, mapreduce, borg, spanner, etc)
52.
by dub 6y ago
In the heyday of 20% time, Google had more money than they knew what to do with and the engineers were generally overqualified. Remember that in the early 2000s Google was famous for hiring people with PhDs and asking them build web servers
53.
by dub 6y ago
The Google Cloud team had more incentive than other teams would to be an early adopter in dogfooding their own products, in this case App Engine specifically. Ending up on Angular was likely a consequence of using app engine: all of the sta
54.
by dub 6y ago
Google Cloud wanted to "eat its own dogfood", so they originally built the console with Angular v1 and App Engine instead of using more scalable and mature frameworks that would typically be used for those kinds of products within
55.
by dub 6y ago
It's interesting that someone found my summary of the article threatening enough that they wanted to vote it down. For context, here's a direct quote from the article describing what the complaint is: "NLRB has found Google’s
56.
by dub 6y ago
It seems like the NLRB is alleging that it is or should be illegal to have a policy against employees spying on each other for non-business reasons at work and using company tools?
57.
by dub 6y ago
There was an old look & feel for Java UIs that made them look as if they were drawn on the back of a napkin, specifically as a reminder that the code was a work in progress: http://napkinlaf.sourceforge.net/
58.
by dub 6y ago
How do you account for all of the respected academic institutions that grant masters degrees in fields of study like African American Studies or Social Justice?
59.
by dub 6y ago
For knife skills, I enthusiastically recommend this free online course. It was recommended to me by a professional chef, and I'd bet most professional chefs would get something (or many things) out of it: https://shop.myblup
60.
by dub 6y ago
The article says the non-blocking read resolved the problem they were having while only introducing five microseconds of latency per borrow from the connection pool. For a consumer-facing, latency-sensitive application, that sounds like muc

More ›