Twitter also had to move away from Ruby into a service-oriented architecture back in the late 00s. It's not a very scalable language, even when you hire people who work on the compiler.
DDH made a funny comment about this in his keynote for the Rails World conference that just happened:
"Twitter moved off rails and I was always really curious about that story. Here's a testimony from someone who actually worked at Twitter when they moved off. Yeah they moved off because they had a badly designed Rails app, that happens. Okay and then they moved into what they thought was better a constellation of java microservices and then nothing fucking happened for 10 years. They poured concrete over the application and hired thousands of people to make no progress at all."
You can watch the whole talk here, the quote starts around the 15 min mark:
Twitter had to move away from Rails because their high-volume read/write pattern of unrelated data doesn't scale on rdbms and that made ActiveRecord a poor fit for tweets.
They famously and stupidly blamed Ruby and everyone ate their blogpost up because this industry is full of cargo cult behavior patterns. Everyone acts like lemmings and just assumes BigCo knows better than they do.
Well, you have to put the human cost investment into the picture. When the cost to develop/maintain becomes significantly high, it’s a natural choice to deprecate it and move on to something faster.
It scaled for a long time for Twitter. With few exceptions, we're not going to work at anything close to the scale of Twitter at the time, so that's plenty scalable for most use cases. Now, if you want to be more compute-efficient that's a different question...
You advance in either lifestyle or risk (maybe both). Managers are better equipped to optimize and climb established business structures. ICs are better equipped to create new products or at least jump into a nimble team. Maybe you should take more risk on special projects in your organization, spearhead new technology shifts, or join a startup (giving substantial due diligence to understand the feasibility of a startup business plan from a technical perspective).
Strength Training @ Crunch Gym, 2-3x/week, 90 min each. I walk uphill or bike to get my heart rate up, then 1 hr workout. I used to do a wide variety of physical activities: tennis, rock climbing, dancing, golf, hiking, running. They were great for socialization but I didn’t really get a balanced fitness using them as my primary workout. Especially as you age, strength training is a great base. I do it solo because I don’t like the CrossFit style energy. It’s great for energy, anti-anxiety, focus.
Annecdotally, as an ambivert, my experience with chat apps (versus physical life) results in even more social anxiety. The amount of criticism on Slack is higher than I experience in physical life. When you see a person, you can pick up on queues that they are being sarcastic or recognize their individual speech pattern as something to minimize. Text looks far more uniform in terms of interpreting emotion/personality. Even when I post on HN, I’m not sure if some comment I tried to write in a measured way will be harshly criticized. When I say something similar in person, the hearer has a moment pause before saying something adversarial because they can see my face and humanize me.
Anecdotally, as an introvert, I prefer text to f2f, precisely because I know it will be judged on the words as chosen, and not on any extraneous cues. Criticism and adversarial responses are welcome; what annoys me no end in f2f is when people attempt to introduce some inaccurate interpretation of information from a paracommunicative channel to the discussion, instead of bothering to parse and respond to what I have actually said.
Fair enough, seems conflict resolution is better in person. What could we do to make our voices level and spread contagious intellect and positive discussions?
This is a different age, but I think the same principle applies. When I was 20, I started getting issues from excessive keyboard usage. It stayed for 5 years even though I cut down substantially & tried massages. I ended up rock climbing and my issues went away with larger muscles. I’m in my 40s now and still use the same approach: where can I build muscle and make the pain subside. It doesn’t take much muscle, normally 3-6 months of practice @ 2x/week. The results normally stick pretty long, even when I back off the practice.
I have experienced similar issues before, where a lot of discomfort etc vanish with more physical exercise. For me that would be mostly push ups, pull ups, daily bike commuting etc.
I increased that a lot a few years back when I started bike commuting my 9km route to the office, and haven't had much of such issues since then. (Cycling seems to add quite some static exercise for hands and underarms)
Very interesting. I was going to make the same suggestion. Specifically bouldering since I think it's generally easier for folks to plug into their daily routines with the proliferation of gyms and not needing a significant amount of equipment. But three times per week bouldering has radically changed my body and hands for the better. I no longer have elbow or forearm/wrist pain that I used to experience quite frequently after typing for a long period.
I also want to mention that I am in my 40s and had never climbed before I started about 5 months ago. I just signed up to take an intro to bouldering course at a local gym and went from there.
Additionally climbing is a very technical sport that involves a lot of problem solving which I find very appealing.
Being overweight or out of shape shouldn't stop you from giving it a try, you might stay climbing lower grade problems longer than others but you will still find challenging physical and mental puzzles that you can complete.
Given that there is tremendous code sharing of Apple's OS+AppStore software on the laptop and phone, I have not understood how both hardware products are not subject to the same rules. Phones are basically micro-laptops and should have similar platform expectations, legally.
Why not CCTV? Having video footage to subpoena after a crime is committed, then analyze, seems less surveillance society than going straight to a real-time, individual tracking data store.
1. Note that this is a news aggregator for tech startups. Tech startups in large cities tend to hire most of their experienced engineers from FAANG companies. So, it's in a tech startup's interest to critique FAANGs.
2. You could want to be a great startup founder or early engineer as an ambition. Probabilistically, your most straightforward path to this goal is to go to a FAANG next. Golden handcuffs, most people come in with this ambition then don't leave because there's so many pleasant aspects. Think about point #1 again.
3. If you are trying to get into a more respected tech community and are limited by visa issues, which companies tend to solve more often than individuals, it's probably in your interest to find a company [1] that will clear this hurtle for you and [2] that has a brand you can leverage. FAANG is a subset of companies that would provide that option.
