I seriously doubt this version of the story. While it's possible for several hardware/firmware to fail in all your datacenters, for them to fail at the same time is highly unlikely. This may just be a PR spin to think they're not vulnerable to security attacks.
While this was happening at Github, I noticed several other companies facing that same issue at the same time. Atlassian was down for the most part. It could have been an issue with the service github uses, but they won't admit that. Notice they never said what the firmware issue was instead blaming it on 'hardware'.
I think they should be transparent with people about such vulnerability, but I suspect they would never say so because then they would lose revenue.
They're not hosted in multiple datacenters; there was a power interruption in their single datacenter that exposed this firmware bug. The point of this postmortem isn't the initial power interruption but rather its repercussions, why it took so long to recover from and how they can improve their response and communications in the future.
Ok...so this is another PR...without admitting the issue. I don't know github's infrastructure, but they have a single point of failure? Last I know, every place these days have backup power especially a datacenter...so those were not working either? My point is that it's much better to be upfront sometimes. In fact github didn't have to say anything about the whole thing since everyone forgot already...
I wonder how many of those minorities are working the low ends at Google...the details of course didn't say. Also, they stopped short of saying it's the perception and blame the facts on 'statistics'. I'm sure they have no problems hiring cooks, janitors, etc who are minorities.
By saying you don't want to be a real programmer, I'm hoping you don't mean a good/great programmer.
Isn't it interesting how we're telling everyone to learn how to code, but then people feel like impostors? Well you can't learn good programming and cs standards in a few days or weeks, even in a few years. So no wonder a lot of people feel like impostors.
Having said that, it takes quite some time to really develop as a software engineer into a real software engineer. You need to know architecture, design, best decisions, security, caching and more. That's what I call a real programmer. Can you design a search service? If you can't, can you learn enough to design it? How would you even start? Everyone can code, but not everyone can design a system that is scalable, fast, robust and secure.
In addition, to be a real programmer, I think you need to start thinking about the future...how will people want to use a browser in the future? If I'm a developer, how can I make XYZ easier and faster to build for other developers? How can I make it so that the code is reusable? Will a framework make it easy? How should that framework be built? How are people going to use it? Etc...
Some of it is deliberate thinking and some of it is work experience.
So a lot of this kind of thinking comes from real problems software engineers faced while working. Discussions, debates, etc... They found a solution and it was elegant enough for others to use.
That's how I think someone goes from an impostor to a real programmer.
I'm quite surprised this happened to github...Sometimes I'm trying to look at some repos, but I apparently click too fast and have to wait before I can do other things. I thought they had ddos attacks under control.
Oh wow! These guys are in Davis Square in Somerville not far from me...I've been working on some idea about the same thing for 4 years now...back then people would laugh at the idea because Pandora was already there. But now?
A sure giveaway is to monitor the job board of the company. If they are bullish, they're constantly posting jobs and you can tell exactly what area of the company is growing or shrinking.
While this was happening at Github, I noticed several other companies facing that same issue at the same time. Atlassian was down for the most part. It could have been an issue with the service github uses, but they won't admit that. Notice they never said what the firmware issue was instead blaming it on 'hardware'.
I think they should be transparent with people about such vulnerability, but I suspect they would never say so because then they would lose revenue.
Here on my blog I talked about this issue: http://julesjaypaulynice.com/simple-server-malicious-attacks...
I think it was some ddos campaign going on over the web.