owen

owen, 8 days ago

It would have been fantastically expensive to buy support - the language was never the vendor's primary product, or even close to it. That cost should have been a warning sign about the magnitude of the risk exposure we were taking on.

Unfortunately, there's no easy path back off of that language now. We have megalines' worth of investment into using it, and that can't be backed out faster than it was written, really.

owen, 8 days ago

The practical consequences of this decision range from "you can't have syntax highlighting in your editor" (annoying human factors problem) to "we are maintaining complex remote environments to support development, with a substantial daily operational cost" (financially reportable, and therefore "substantial" in some ways that the human factors sometimes aren't).

owen, 15 days ago

@acdha Similarly with lpass, if you must use lastpass, and any other password manager. I've even done this with the Vault CLI!

owen, 16 days ago

relatedly, where we all droppin fam? pulumi's a non-starter for me because of the amount of infra needed to get a basic hello-world project running

edit: also because they're venture-backed https://www.pulumi.com/blog/series-c/

owen, 15 days ago

@danhulton I don't think terraform can be simple as it sits in a difficult space. The primary use case is, essentially, declarative contract management, through the programmatic language of the contractor's own API. That's a problem that I think will follow along to any other approach to managing cloud services, inevitably, and I'm okay with that.

Terraform's bit of genius is to accept that complexity and support it without requiring a bunch of external infra. You can get started using files.

owen, 23 days ago

One of the reasons I pulled out of doing open source infrastructure development, scrubbed my Github profile, and otherwise dropped out of Free Public Software Development is that I am bone tired of giving free labour to these fucks.

owen, 23 days ago

I want to support my peers, and none of the people who benefit when I do those things are my peers.

owen, 28 days ago

@danhulton Crawling links is a cataloguing strategy! I think it's one predicated on the idea that the web is too large and too rapidly-changing for manual curation, but that's … debatably true? It's too large for one person or organization to catalogue, I'll grant, but there are other alternatives besides spidering.

owen, 28 days ago

Companies like Google have framed the answer as a single, free-text field, with the promise to find something for any query from a corpus consisting of pages found by progressive mechanical indexing of links. That demonstrably is useful, both for Google and for at least some of its users, but equally, that demonstrably is not universally valuable.

owen, 28 days ago

I'm of an age to remember its predecessors, back at least as far as WebCrawler, which provided basically the same idea with, as you go earlier and earlier, more naive implementations of free-text search. L'WebCrawler, for example, mostly found you whichever pages contained your search phrase most frequently.

owen, 28 days ago

I'm also of an age to remember library catalogue search systems (as recently discussed), which ... work differently. Catalogue search expects you to spell out which attributes you want to search, and how you want your terms to be considered. You might, for example, want TITLE: "A Christmas Carol" to return exactly Dickens' book (or the catalogue entry for it, at least), and exactly none of the literary papers about Dickens that happen to be on file.

owen, 28 days ago

With public for-profit search on the internet breaking down badly - and with Google, Bing, DDG, and their also-ran peers breaking down particularly badly in the direction of "here's a thing you can buy" - I think the time is actually ripe for a discussion of what we, as users, want out of search, and more generally how we want to find information on the internet.

owen, 29 days ago

Anyways if you want to use my code, my email is in my profile and I am happy to talk to you about it.

For personal use I'll probably tell you, for you, no charge, even.

owen, 1 month ago

Software that supports a business has operational externalities - costs that must be paid for the software to do what it does. Those costs include, for example, time spent on outages.

owen, 1 month ago

In organizations I've been part of, those costs have systematically been under-represented, and often unrepresented, on "devops"-based teams' commitments, both formal (OKRs, etc) and informal (interdepartmental expectations management, tasks that actually get done, etc), except on an emergency basis.

owen, 1 month ago

Unfortunately, deciding that it's no longer someone's job to do operational work, such as capacity planning or continuity management, does not relieve the consequences when those tasks are ignored or done badly.