100% this. Only use containers for remote execution: CI, staging, production. Run native code locally. Manage dependencies and isolate project environments with NIX.
You can tell the author is mostly worn out not from long hours or challenging technical work, but from fighting against the overwhelming inertia that faces building/shipping anything. It’s exhausting.
This article is dangerous in romanticizing the “not invented here” culture at many big tech companies and seems rooted more in the 90s than present day.
The world of open source tooling and easily re-usable SAAS offerings means everyone has access to the best tools, whether you’re a small startup or a big company.
Anyone who longs for internal, corporate tooling baffles me when they can use things that actually have polish, user experience and likely better implementations under the hood.
Companies should spend their time/energy building things unique to their problem domain, not weak also-ran corporate tooling.
I spent two terrible years in Mountain View for a work opportunity I couldn't turn down and it was horrible. Our rent went up 20% during that time. It felt completely unsustainable, ecologically and financially to live there.
We moved back to Boston and have been overjoyed with fleeing the peninsula. I'd still love to visit north of San Francisco of south of Monterrey on vacation but they literally couldn't pay me enough to live there.
ezCater is the #1 online marketplace for business catering in the United States – a $21 Billion market.
We’re backed by Insight Venture Partners and have been growing 3X per year, and we want to grow even faster. We’re always looking for highly skilled engineers to help build our web and mobile apps, while riding this rocket ship of growth.
At ezCater, technology is valued as a differentiator and also as a key component of our success. We push ourselves everyday to better the codebase, improve performance, and deliver an amazing customer experience.
RubyGems.org has their own web server and web services for publishing library versions and to allow the clients to fetch libraries and query the universal registry.
It's totally reasonable to host your code on github and to build a package manager that loads the content of a package from it's github repo.
What seems insane is to use a single github repo as the universal directory of packages and their versions driving your package manager.
There's a reason rubygems has their own servers and web services to support this use case for the central library registry, even if the source for gems are all individually projects hosted on github.
The problem with performance optimization is that if you obsess with optimizing code well outside the critical path, it's often wasted effort drowned out by larger latencies.
If this code was part of a web application, the I/O bound latency of backend/persistence calls will almost always outweigh any CPU bound processing time.
So they may have made this method call 14x faster, but how much latency were they really shaving off their average request? I would be surprised if it were more than a rounding error.
I don't understand why people think serving a blank or janky page to your users is OK. There's no reason not to serve a completely rendered page from the server side and only enhance the UI with client-side rendering and navigation when there is a user action or other event after page load.
The test case used text in a table, which is an extremely poor example. Modern designs use a lot of images and CSS, where presenting a complete document and stylesheets allows much faster time to render than client-side rendering followed by fetching all those assets and applying styles.
The pain for your users is multiplied by the slowness of mobile devices/networks and the complexity of your UI's layout to render.
Outsourcing functionality or work makes a lot of sense for things that aren't core to your business. If you're building a web or mobile app, backend services should be core to your business.
It's a very different thing to write a web application or web services that can run on many hosting platforms than to give responsibility for your entire backend to a service provider.
This is a nice PR piece but building operational systems in a marine environment usually requires hardy engineering, equipment, and constant maintenance. It's not a friendly environment.
I can't see the benefits here, if they want water cooling colocation with hydro-electric or other freshwater flows seem much better.
Viktor Frankl wrote about understanding human suffering as the one constant in all our lives and the one thing that binds us all together:
“To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.”
It's a good exercise to enumerate and guess the dramatic maladies of most people around you, but even that belies the larger truth of all of our shared suffering. It's the human condition.