chazu's comments

chazu | 2 months ago | on: How do you stay focused while working on a computer all day?

Legally prescribed pharmaceuticals, caffeine, lately nicotine. I also have to start working immediately when I sit down - and continue working until the day is over. Any prolonged break risks taking me out of my resource state.

It's great.

chazu | 3 years ago | on: Zero one infinity rule

I'm consistently shocked by the number of people who have never heard of this principle. Introducing arbitrary numerical limits (emphasis on _arbitrary_, as performance limitations or other actual requirements obviously trump this rule) is a design decision that I find myself having to clean up after frequently.

I see a lot of people here questioning the wisdom of the rule, however, like every other principle used in SWE, it shouldn't be applied blindly. Ask yourself "why am I specifying that a maximum of five wangervanes can be specified in the turboencabulator settings?" _IF_ you have a good reason, fine. Most of the time you will not.

chazu | 3 years ago | on: Zero one infinity rule

Examples of issues Ive seen in the wild because people violate this rule include payroll systems with an arbitrary maximum number of pay codes and review app systems with a static number of review apps.

Just like every other heuristic in software engineering, its not a silver bullet, but generally speaking, this principle will serve you well.

chazu | 3 years ago | on: The Yaml document from hell

Cue is one of the most exciting developments that's impacted me professionally in recent years. I can't advocate for it enough.

chazu | 3 years ago | on: How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

Not sure what you mean. Sometimes the word API is used in one sense, sometimes in another. It's a useful distinction insofar as it allows you to talk about APIs as things used by programmers. I find many developers have a hard time understanding this sense of the word API and as a result fail to apply good API design principles such as SOLID. In fact I think this is often what separates mediocre programmers from good ones.

chazu | 3 years ago | on: What SRE Could Be

90% of SREs and SRE managers haven't read the SRE book(s).

99.9% of folks hiring SREs or starting SRE teams haven't read the SRE book.

The SRE book (and its sequels) say quite plainly what SRE is and isn't. They also say that not every org is going to be exactly like google so no, "we're not google" isn't an excuse.

the E in SRE is for engineering. As in software engineering. SREs are software engineers. Or should be. If your SREs don't know basic SWE principles, they're not SREs. If your org isn't applying software engineering principles to minimizing operational complexity at scale, your org isn't doing SRE.

I'm constantly shocked by how hard these things are to grasp, even for most SREs. If the problems I (occasionally) get to solve weren't more interesting than most regular product work, I'd get out of "SRE" entirely.

chazu | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

> From the productivity standpoint, it is not acceptable that a Machine Learning engineer or a Full Stack Developer are expected to know Kubernetes. Or that they need to interact with a Kubernetes person/team.

I agree - these things should be abstracted from the developer - thats the goal of SRE/platform engineering - DevOps is [supposed to be] as you said, a philosophical and cultural stance around early productionization. While not mutually exclusive, they're not the same thing.

But back to your point re: orchestration-level concerns being foisted upon devs - at a shop of any size, there will be devs who feel they _need_ to touch kubernetes to get their job done (wrongly, IMHO) as well as devs who want nothing to do with it - so without engineering leadership throwing their support heavily behind a specific approach, its hard for a small team to deliver value.

chazu | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

> one could argue that the role of sys admins just got more specialized

Read the introduction to the SRE book, available free online [1] - and you'll see that SRE is defined _in contrast to_ systems administration. Its specifically defined as software engineering with the goal of managing operational complexity.

Modern shops' failure to understand this (most SREs haven't read any of the book, let alone stopped to think what SRE actually means) is IMHO a primary factor in the failure of most "devops transformations"

[1] https://sre.google/sre-book/part-I-introduction/

chazu | 4 years ago | on: The Big DevOps Misunderstanding

Agreed - this idea is often cited by fans of the book 'Team Topologies'. Its important here to distinguish between the idea of _an_ internal platform team and a _platform engineering_ team. A platform team is any team which provides services to internal clients - one such team would be the one (or ones) supporting whatever platforms-as-a-service are being used to deploy software to production.
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