found drama

get oblique

canary releases and adaptive LIFO queues

by !undefined

Facebook’s Ben Maurer makes some great points in his Fail at Scale. I didn’t watch the accompanying video presentation, but it’s an extremely interesting read about how they try to anticipate and manage failures. The observation that it’s so often linked back to configuration changes is an interesting one. I also enjoyed the bit about canary releases and the adaptive LIFO queues.

Being the Allspaw fan that I am, I always cringe a bit when I see someone so cavalierly throw out the phrases “human error” and “root cause” — no matter what their data say. But their “DERP” methodology softens the blow a bit. If you’re not doing post mortems incident reviews using something like that, then there’s a good chance that yours are toxic.

“entire classes of apps that don’t benefit”

by !undefined

Malte Ubl (@cramforce) brings a well-reasoned discussion about what trade-offs you’re making when choosing your frameworks (both on the back- and front-end), and whether to defer the majority of the view rendering to the client, or to do it on the server. There are tons of posts out there like this, but this particular one is all signal and no noise. If you’re researching this topic, this is an excellent companion.

Homebrew #13: Flaming Hessian

by Rob Friesel

Homebrew session #13 was an experiment on all fronts. How to create a novel take an oft-loved-yet-also-oft-derided seasonal variety? I’m talking of course about the Halloween pumpkin beer, but figured why not add a little chili heat? Thus was born Flaming Hessian, the fourth Tilde Gravitywerks original:

Flaming Hessian chili-pumpkin ale -- could stand another couple days to finish carbonating, and I wish it had a little more chili heat, but it works (and I've got good ideas for next year's batch) #latergram #homebrewing Continue reading →

about that rejected Sanders campaign donation

by not another Rob?

RE: Bernie Sanders rejects CEO Martin Shkreli’s campaign donation, I have a couple of things to throw out there:

  1. Good for Bernie for rejecting the donation; doubly good for donating it to a clinic.
  2. I think it’s a mistake not to meet with Shkreli though. Regardless of whether he is the “poster boy for drug company greed”, rejecting someone out of hand without even hearing them out seems wrong. (And has a smell of rejecting due process.)
    1. Which, granted, I don’t think Shkreli has a leg to stand on w/r/t/ justifying his actions in the slightest — at least not in context of his much-publicized price hike on Daraprim ($13.50 to $750).
    2. AND/BUT/SO all the more reason to meet with him — because if nothing else, can you imagine the Good Laugh™ Bernie would get from listening to such a screed? (And/or maybe his physician recommended against such a meeting because it would just put him to foaming at the mouth?) 1
  3. You can tell Shkreli is a shill because all his quotes seem to employ “sort of” and “kind of” as modifiers. Like he isn’t willing to just come out and say what he means.
  4. As for Shkreli’s remark about “[taking] risks for innovation” — maybe actually (you know) take those risks instead of trying to mooch off of the success of a drug developed in 1958 and not by you.
  1. So about Shkreli’s justification… I would love to hear this one. How exactly do you justify an approx. 5555% increase in a drug that was developed 62 years ago, NOT by your company, and has been unencumbered by patents for many years?[↩]

9 thoughts about 4 hours with AngularJS 2

by !undefined

AngularJS 2

Long story short: 1 I was only able to give a couple hours of dev time to my hack team at our company’s hackathon yesterday. We chose AngularJS 2 as the backbone 2 of our app’s front-end 3 because… Well: why not take the developer preview for a test drive? Isn’t that what hackathons are for?

Continue reading →

  1. Something something previously scheduled PTO. Something something family commitments.[↩]
  2. NO PUN INTENDED.[↩]
  3. WORSE PUN ALSO NOT INTENDED.[↩]

dream.20151008: bunkering at the movies

by Rob Friesel

The gunfire draws nearer. The bombs thump; you feel them in your chest. Everywhere is debris. Twisted rebar, candy wrapper scraps, shreds of clothing, popcorn. Everyone has been ushered into the bunker. The bunker is a movie theater — an underground movie theater. The trick is to make sure that the film keeps going, and that the film doesn’t reflect the war all around. The enemy could penetrate the silver screen, they could pass through the fourth wall. And it’s crowded in there. You slip in and out of the doors. (“Don’t let any light in!”) Keep popping the popcorn. Keep the popcorn flowing into the theater. Reload your rifles with the kernels.

on SoundCloud’s microservices story

by !undefined

Fascinating story from Phil Calçado at SoundCloud about their shift from a monolithic Rails app toward microservices and a service-oriented architecture.

It’s refreshing to read someone else’s story, and to see how well it lines up with the one that I’ve been living professionally for the past couple of years. The best part? The sobering admission that no matter how disciplined you are about pulling things out of your monolith, that some things are just so stable and so… cheap (??), that you’re better off just leaving them in there.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the desire to keep decomposing, but only if it’s done thoughtfully. Because as a friend recently quipped:

on serializing stories online

by not non-fiction

RE: The Value of Practicing in Public – Curiosity Never Killed the Writer

And/or, as I said to myself: “Remember how, as a kid, you used to serialize all that fan-fiction on Prodigy? Wasn’t that silly?” 1 Except for the part where people were actually reading the stories. And I actually finished them. And they actually got better as I went along.

Maybe I should give that another shot?

  1. I’m almost loathe to admit this, but I was rather a prolific writer of Wing Commander fan fiction back in the heyday of the original game.[↩]