Highlights

The first scaling crisis happened in 1996, when Linus wrote that he was "buried alive in emails". It was addressed by adopting a more modular architecture, with the introduction of loadable kernel modules, and the creation of the maintainers role, who support the contributors in ensuring that they implement the high standards of quality needed to merge their contributions.

The second scaling crisis lasted from 1998 to 2002, and was finally addressed by the adoption of BitKeeper, later replaced by Git. This distributed the job of merging contributions across the network of maintainers and contributors.

In both cases, technology was used to reduce the amount of dependencies between teams, help contributors keep a high level of autonomy, and make it easy to merge all those contributions back into the main repository, Bernhard said.

Technology can help reduce the need to communicate between teams whenever they have a dependency on another team to get their work done.

Resurfaced in my feed. Obvious in retrospect.

cross-posted from: https://group.lt/post/1926151

Don't read if you don't want to ruin your day.

The One About The Web Developer Job Market

Metadata

• Author: Baldur Bjarnason
• Category: rss
• URL: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-one-about-the-web-developer-job-market/

Highlights

Many organisations are also resorting to employee-hostile strategies to increase employee churn, such as forced Return-To-Office policies.

Finding a non-bullshit job is likely only going to get harder.

• Finding effective documentation, information, and training is likely to get harder, especially in specialised topics where LLMs are even less effective than normal.

as soon as you start to try to predict the second or third order consequences things very quickly get remarkably difficult.

In short, futurists are largely con artists.

you need to do something Note: ah.. the famous "you need to do something" This is not a one-

Highlights

COBOL remains crucial to businesses and institutions around the world.

It is estimated $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through COBOL systems, while 95% of ATM swipes and 80% of in-person banking transactions rely on COBOL code.

when unemployment claims suddenly spiked due to the pandemic, these archaic systems could not keep up, which means that benefits are not being distributed.

The spike in unemployment claims exposed another new problem: there is no one around to repair these legacy systems.

Although a few universities still offer COBOL courses, the number of people studying it today is extremely small.

COBOL Cowboys’ business model is more akin to the gig economy rather than to that of the companies at which these industry veterans spent their careers. It is staff

Good before going to bed on Friday evening :)

Some things I have noted:

Until this day, I say I've done three things: insert levels of indirection, trade off space and time, and three, try to get my clients to tell me what they really want.

If you're doing something with ERP systems, well, first of all, I apologize and feel bad for you in life, but that's a whole other conversation.

Let's think somebody ultimately is paying for this thing to be built. Somebody somewhere has a vision on what they want it to be. There are humans who will eventually be using it. It needs to meet those business or mission needs. It has to start with that.

what bothers me is when people make implicit assumptions and don't make them explicit.

"The decisions that you make upfront are the ones that," and this is paraphrasing, "the ones that are too expensive and you cannot change later."

But I'm talking about when you make a decision, write it down, make an architectural decision record. It can b

Yea or Nay?

Could be fun ;)

A nice cheatsheet/summary for software architecture

What is your favorite paper from 2013 or earlier published at a SIGSOFT-sponsored software engineering conference (e.g. ICSE, FSE, ASE, ISSTA, ...)?

You can nominate it for an ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award!!

https://sigsoft.org/awards/impactpaper/

sigsoft #icse #ase @SIGSOFT @softwareengineering

Even sourcing, cqrs and friends and a take on YAGNI

cross-posted from: https://group.lt/post/321290

This talk covers the origins of flame graphs, how you can create them using open source software, and how to interpret them. In practice, flame graphs don’t always work completely due to problems walking stack traces, resolving symbols, and other issues; this talk explains the problems and shows you the latest techniques for fixing them.

cross-posted from: https://group.lt/post/320665

Joe Duffy discusses the challenges (and solutions) met while running IaC and how that shapes the future of IaC.

Mark Richards' long running series on software architecture comes in bite-sized videos running about 10 minutes.