Reminds me that the balance between logic and emotion within a sociological system was explored many moons ago in the Matrix trilogy through the relationship between the Architect(Logic) and Oracle(Intuition).
WARNING: Mild spoilers if you've not seen the Matrix films
The analytics led social media platforms are evolving towards the early versions of the Matrix created solely by the Architect and ultimately rejected by the humans within:
"The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equalled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being.
Thus, I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure.
I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche.
If I am the father of the Matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother." Architect - The Matrix Reloaded (via Wikiquote)
As an industry (and engineers) we have a tendency towards being led by logic and there has been a cultural focus (e.g. DevOps) on being led by metrics...we can sometimes miss or downplay the squishy yet equally important emotive side of systems ;)
As for London's time as banking capital of Europe being over - at this stage all anyone knows for sure is that a "small" majority of the UK voting public voted indidacated they would like the UK to leave the current EU - that's it.
And at this early stage absolutely none of the UK or EU governing bodies or institutions currently know how this leaving process is going to be implemented or end - if it even starts.
Congratulations and well done on what must have been quiet a scary leap of faith into the unknown.
Thoroughly enjoy the magazine and podcast (both of which I highly recommend).
Well what sort of story are you expecting to hear? Without going into detail it's not really that exciting.
There was a requirement for high volume/through put messaging component in our infrastructure.
That technological requirement (along with non functional requirements e.g. development time/costs) was more than adequately met by a program(s) written by a team member written in Go. Was it an opportunity to further explore the "new hotness" that is/was Go…absolutely but the solution could have been implemented in one of the other supported technologies C/C++/Java with appropriate advantages/disadvantages associated with each. It will stay in use for as long as it provides the best solution, if that changes a more appropriate solution will be investigated.
> 'This guy re-wrote all our stuff in the new hotness then left the company'
The Go dataStore is "a" component within a large infrastructure, it is supportable by more than one member of the development team (a core requirement when deploying any new technology to production).
I'll also note that before Andy left, being a professional and thoughtful colleague, he put a lot of effort into ensuring appropriate training and knowledge was given to team members that had not been part of the deployment.
As Andy is a very well regarded former colleague, it helps that we could easily get in touch for a query, even when we're out for a beer or five* :)
I doubt Andy would disagree with you, it's no slight or bad commentary against Python (Andy was the cheerleader for introducing Python into our infrastructure where it is blossoming nicely).
With sufficient development time Andy could have introduced more concurrency and optimisation into the Python monitoring component (I'm thinking Gevent might have been a nice fit)...but without introducing additional frameworks or libraries Go had these features as a core component.
The offhand performance comment aside, Andy was noting that a component written in Go is depended on to handle VERY high volumes of message throughput in a financial services firm.
While no proof of reliability it is merely anecdotal support that Go is being used in production environments.
Andy convinced management by spending a lot of personal development time creating and testing the Go components before demonstrating in a peer review process that they were an appropriate solution.
There's no special method - the introduction of Go was incremental. If I remember correctly the monitoring collection component (mentioned in the blog post) was the first. It was small, easy to swap in and easy to demonstrate the improvements.
You build trust in the technology and work flow before moving on to larger more critical/risky projects.
(Andy is very much missed by his former colleagues)
WARNING: Mild spoilers if you've not seen the Matrix films
The analytics led social media platforms are evolving towards the early versions of the Matrix created solely by the Architect and ultimately rejected by the humans within:
"The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equalled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being.
Thus, I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure.
I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche.
If I am the father of the Matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother." Architect - The Matrix Reloaded (via Wikiquote)
As an industry (and engineers) we have a tendency towards being led by logic and there has been a cultural focus (e.g. DevOps) on being led by metrics...we can sometimes miss or downplay the squishy yet equally important emotive side of systems ;)