> When I think about the counterfactual me that grew up in a large American city, New York or L.A. instead of Toronto,
And just think, those are the American areas most common to Canada.
There are places in America where those counterfactuals do not exist, where the necessities aren't locked behind counters, where community is thriving, and where the normality of civic life is an expectation.
I expect no honors for those parts of the country. If Canada didn't have an air of superiority to comfort itself with, it would have nothing at all.
> If Canada didn't have an air of superiority to comfort itself with, it would have nothing at all.
Canada might be known for many things, but you're the first I've heard refer to an "air of superiority" that we carry around. "Nice" and "polite" maybe. Sorry you feel this way. Have a good day.
Canadians aren't crass enough to describe it as superiority, but it is true that the identity of English-speaking Canada is largely built on "not being America" and that the vast majority of the population is content as long as things are "better than in the USA".
ah yes, the places where women can expect to die if they happen to need medical care while pregnant and where LGBTQ people are not treated the same as most citizens. Sounds lovely.
Whatever the epithets, the truth of the matter is those urban areas are closer to what Canada aspires to be (and currently is). Whereas the parts of Canada she cares about are alive and well in the US (and used to be more like what Canada was).
The question becomes: if you're traveling on a line, and you see the destination looks dark ahead of you, do you turn around or keep going?
Canada's notoriously polite deference led them to align with those powerful tech, marketing, and financial hubs in the US. A cheerleader on the sidelines. But everyone gets to pick. There's a lack of acknowledgement that there's even a choice; the dog that didn't bark one could say. But it's part and parcel of why modern Canada is the way it is.
> This ICE stuff is that scaled up to a multi-billion dollar federal agency with, apparently, no accountability for following the law at all.
It should be mentioned that "illegal" is a definitive word. There are definitely people not willing to follow the law, including political entities which are dependent on it. The moniker of privacy in this respect is a shield for illegality, because there is no reason that Medicaid data regarding SSNs should be shielded from the federal government.
To take this to its logical conclusion, Americans must concede that EU/UK systems of identity and social services are inherently immoral.
I have a hard time parsing your first paragraph, but there is no reason at all for any part of the US government that isn't CMMS to have any access to Medicaid data, writ large, at all. And even CMMS should only see de-identified data. It's absolutely absurd to think that law enforcement has any reason to see anything in any MC database.
> The "micro" in "microservice" doesn't refer to how it is deployed, it refers to how the service is "micro" in responsibility.
The "micro" in microservice was a marketing term to distinguish it from the bad taste of particular SOA technology implementations in the 2000s. A similar type of activity as crypto being a "year 3000 technology."
The irony is it was the common state that "services" weren't part of a distributed monolith. Services which were too big were still separately deployable. When services became nothing but an HTTP interface over a database entity, that's when things became complicated via orchestration; orchestration previously done by a service... not done to a service.
I remember when microservices were introduced and they were solving real problems around 1) independent technological decisions with languages, data stores, and scaling, and 2) separating team development processes. They came out of Amazon, eBay, Google and a host of successful tech titans that were definitely doing "engineering." The Bezos mandate for APIs in 2002 was the beginning of that era.
It was when the "microservices considered harmful" articles started popping up that microservices had become a fad. Most of the HN early-startup energy will continue to do monoliths because of team communication reasons. And I predict that if any of those startups are successful, they will have need for separate services for engineering reasons. If anything, the historical faddishness of HN shows that hackers pick the new and novel because that's who they are, for better or worse.
They also failed as a company, which is why that's on Twilio's blog now. So there's that. Undoubtedly their microservices architecture was a bad fit because of how technically focused the product was. But their solution with a monolith didn't have the desired effect either.
Failed? It was a $3.2B acquisition with a total of 283M raised. I don’t see any way that’s a failure.
That said I’m curious if you’re basing this on service degradation you’ve seen since the acquisition. We were thinking of starting to use them - is that a bad move?
By all means use Segment. Segment was a great technology with an incredible technical vision for what they wanted to do. I was in conversations in that office on Market far beyond what they ended up doing post-acquisition.
But a company that can't stand on its own isn't a success in my opinion. Similar things can be said about companies that continue to need round after round of funding without an IPO.
My comment is of the "(2018)" variety. Old news that didn't age well like the people jumping on the "Uber: why we switched to MySQL from Postgres" post. (How many people would choose that decision today?)
People tend to divorce the actual results of a lot of these companies from the gripes of the developers of the tech blogs.
I've been developing under that understanding since before Fowler-said-so. His take is simply a description of a phenomenon predating the moniker of microservices. SOA with things like CORBA, WSDL, UDDI, Java services in app servers etc. was a take on service oriented architectures that had many problems.
Anyone who has ever developed in a Java codebase with "Service" and then "ServiceImpl"s everywhere can see the lineage of that model. Services were supposed to be the API, and the implementation provided in a separate process container. Microservices signalled a time where SOA without Java as a pre-requisite had been successful in large tech companies. They had reached the point of needing even more granular breakout and a reduction of reliance on Java. HTTP interfaces was an enabler of that. 2010s era microservices people never understood the basics, and many don't even know what they're criticizing.
I think you are confusing limitations of Java at the time with something else. Interfaces everywhere and single implementation classes has nothing at all to do with Microservices or SOA.
A useful distinction I've made before is that of technical vs business services.
This also mirrors the alignment that arises in tech companies between platform (very useful to be centralized) vs architecture. Platform technologies are useful as pure technology, and therefore horizontally distributable. Whereas big-a Architecture as a central committee died an ignominious death for good reason: product and business decisions require deep knowledge, and therefore architecture is simply a function a product team does.
I am old enough to remember when there were simply "services," and there was an understanding that a service was something a team or business function did, because it mirrored Conway's Law. The root of service is literally "serve." That there was a one-to-one correspondence between a software service and the team serving others was a given.
Microservices were a natural evolution of this. When growth happened, parts of those things improperly in a too-large service were pushed down so they could be used by multiple teams. But the idea of a hierarchy of concerns was always present in plain ol' SOA.
Gigantic. Full of energy. Able to support massive inland freshwater lakes with desalinization. Essentially unlimited solar yet unable to utilize spare capacity. And it's already been wrecked from biological "terraforming" with non-native species.
If we can't figure out how to balance ecological and biological concerns on terra, we're not going to be able to do it extraterrestrially.
As a history refresher: DOGE is part of the USDS, created by Barack Obama in 2014.
Dealing with PII was an overt part of their remit, as the Medicare system (written in COBOL) had substantial difficulties dealing with regulatory change, and it was to be modernized. As special government employees, they were 1) consultants not appointed through the regular process and 2) had widespread access to software systems and private data across the federal government. And yes, many of them were the age of current DOGE employees.
At its height, there were 700+ employees with varying levels of access like this.
Accessing PII is normal for federal contractors, even young ones. I worked on the maintenance database for the F-35 strike fighter when I was 23. There are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people through the federal system and contractors with access to information like this.
This one has been fascinating to watch because it is moving so fast it is almost not leaving enough time for the conservative universe to marshal their rationalization machine. This is not being run like the USDS at all, there is no oversight, no published protocols, no firewalling. Basically, no rules. This ain't normal, and you shouldn't be trying to convince people it is.
Thank you for introducing some facts into this cesspool of handwringing and pearl-clutching. Of course, facts will be downvoted, but we both expect that.
Apart from the access being normal, even if it weren’t, it is bizarre that people are obsessing over these details daily. The same people did not care what their administration did daily previously. They probably also were happy to see Trump’s tax returns leaked. They didn’t care when various large security breaches happened last year. But suddenly privacy is a life and death issue. This is partisanship taken to an extreme degree.
As you are not an American, let me educate on what that bill did.
Much like the "Inflation Reduction Act" which was a clean energy bill that had nothing to do with inflation, the bill did the exact opposite of what it claimed.
- It funded billions of dollars for the NGOs which were aiding illegal immigration
- It normalized and allowed historically high illegal levels of immigration (10x normal)
- It removed the standard process for adjudicating asylum by judges and made it part of the federal ICE
- Required the US to fund lawyers for all people who were charged with illegal immigration (12 million in the last 4 years)
- It gave $60 billion to Ukraine, 3x more than border security [1]
- It gave $14 billion to Israel, $10B to Gaza, $2B for conflicts in the Red Sea, $4B to Taiwan
During this period where 12 million (3.4% of US population) people have crossed the border for residency illegally, many of which have been flown in by the US federal government, the federal government has sued Texas repeatedly while they are trying to build a border wall. They have flown in percentages of whole populations to US swing states to try to build voters. And illegal immigrants count in the census which determines US electoral votes.
The reason the GOP voted against it is because it was a wishlist for the Democratic party. There is nothing more complicated about it than that. If the GOP was such fear mongers, as you say, they'd vote for a bill that ameliorated their concerns.
And just think, those are the American areas most common to Canada.
There are places in America where those counterfactuals do not exist, where the necessities aren't locked behind counters, where community is thriving, and where the normality of civic life is an expectation.
I expect no honors for those parts of the country. If Canada didn't have an air of superiority to comfort itself with, it would have nothing at all.