It’s really cool that you got to watch and recognize this change in your father; seeing it is one thing but then putting the pieces together to present this holistic story seems magical. Thanks for sharing!
One thing I always struggle with is how any of this is different from the stock market. Most people aren’t smart savvy investors just like most people aren’t smart savvy sports betters. Companies have good days and bad days (wins and losses), and people just invest their lives away hoping for a big change. The only thing I see being a major difference is that the industry around the stock market is too engrained in the world to be ever be removed. I dunno, this article made me really unhappy in a “shine the light on things you don’t think about daily” kind of way.
The stock market has no house. Every winner is an investor.
Granted, retail investors lose more often than they win - but there’s no incentive of the market that ensures this - merely asymmetry of information. In contrast, commercial gambling can _only_ work if the house always wins.
This isn’t belied by peer-to-peer gambling (save for non-commercial instances, like a poker game among friends), since in these cases the facilitator will take an exorbitant cut.
Moreover, the stock market serves an ethically legitimate purpose - the efficient allocation of capital. Not so gambling.
Great article and really great pragmatism. Heroku was a pioneer in excellent software design and development, more than they may ever get credit for. It’s not a surprise to me that the author worked at Heroku and thinks like a pro.
I love Ruby. I love rails. I love gems. I love bundler. I’m not sure why the Ruby community is so much stronger at simple software design than any other I’ve been a part of.
I spend most of my time in Python right now, and it’s fine, but I don’t love it like I loved Ruby. The only reason I have to be in Python is because the world of data engineering chose Python as their language. That basically always puts me in the unfortunate situation of having to choose between getting a project/task done using a Python library, or have to write it more by hand in Ruby, and you know which one wins :(.
As far as I can tell, there’s no reason Ruby couldn’t be the language of choice for data engineering, it’s just that no one has spent the time to make it that yet. I wish I could commit my life to that, I would, if nothing else mattered.
Tl;dr, author’s point of view is great, I bet their control plane is great; Ruby is fantastic; and someone should go make a pandas for Ruby and name it something even better like raccoons!
Daniel has a few gems in this blog post and we tried to italicize some of them. My favorite one is around "There is no code without a theory of testing."
"If you have 100% branch coverage, it doesn't mean you've covered all the cases. But it does mean that, whenever an obscure fault is understood in production, or even merely observed in development, there is an incremental path to add it to the base of knowledge in the tests: there are no spans of code with no test model."
Also not surprised to find out that Ozgun from Citus is behind these strong principles! :)
Yea I mean that can basically be assessed as a paradox: how can you possibly write a line of code that you don’t know how to validate its correctness!?
Obviously no one knows anything and only time will tell, but if I had to gander, my conclusion would not be that of the author’s:
> As I pointed out in my previous blog post about the shifts in AWS, the one-stop-cloud-shop approach has shown cracks. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba et al. won’t be able to cover all grounds, neither in tech domains, nor in geo’s.
This doesn’t make much sense to me. What cracks? Aren’t aws regions the solution to geographic control to where your data and infra reside? Also, what tech domain does aws not have a solution for?
I’m not saying the underdog can’t catch up. I’m saying that when aws made this major switch to offer their cloud, it was certainly a first-of-its-kind offering. Lidl offering competitive services to aws doesn’t sound that scary, especially considering that I don’t believe for a second that lidl’s cloud offering comes even close to what aws provides. At that point, if this competitor’s only real value proposition is that they’re “in Europe,” then I’m not sure how compelling of a selling point that is for me to give up everything else I get with my aws offering.
Note: I am using aws as my example solely because it’s what I know best, not affiliated in any way with them as of this writing.
