Software Engineers don’t scale … or how I learned to stop worrying and love commenting my code. NOTE: I originally published this on the Inside Heetch blog This article, by Mathew Skelton and Manuel Pais, reminds me that, for everything that’s been made simpler in this era of cloud computing and micro-services, we’ve paid a price in terms of cognitive load. We simply need to keep more context in mind when making or evaluating any change to our code....
Those of you who know me may be aware that at the end of August 2018, I left my job at Avocet to join a new team at Heetch. The main allure of the role at Heetch was the chance to be part of a team deliberately set up to act as a catalyst for product developers. The concept under which we work is known as “Developer Care”, and back in November I wrote a fairly extensive blog post for Heetch about what that means and how it came to be....
If there’s one thing in this world that makes me mad (and there isn’t, there’s loads of things) it’s the portions of the Free/Libre/Open Source Software community who assume that anything to do with the law is inherently evil. Every time I see this is riles me - from the anti-GFDL people in the Debian community, through the “me too” boys who decry the GPL (and especially the GPL3) as being “less free” than BSD licenses without understanding the effect of either, right down to those whom, even with the best of intentions, make statements like this....
I continue to be totally blown away with ZFS. This post covers a lot of the reasons why. Every time I explore a feature it’s better than I was expecting. The fact that you can send incremental snapshots (essentially the binary different between two points in time) is exciting me currently. There must be the basis of so many applications there - distributed version control and package management are just two ideas that spring to mind....
OK, so many, many people will be saying many things about project Indiana before we ever see anything concrete, and then many more people will inevitably form two camps - the “Indianaphiles” and the “Indianaphobes”. All of that is inevitable and I guess we should just enjoy the ride. However, given the scope for Indiana thus far expressed is “Make a Sun branded Solaris distribution that’s a lot more like Linux”, and that the top man is Ian Murdoch, I have exactly one wish for this project....
Another minor victory in my quest to get more familiar with OpenSolaris. I’ve upgraded to Nexenta unstable, and I noticed a package called sunwaudiohd being installed. That looked like a promising solution to the lack of audio on my OpenSolaris machine - the Intel HDA soundcard has never worked under any version I’ve used. Sadly, the mere presence of this driver didn’t seem to fix things (it’s never that simple). A little research confirmed that it was the right driver, but that this bug had been discovered....
I’ve been playing around with ZFS for quite a while now and I’m very impressed. Everything that’s claimed of it holds up under my limited investigation. I’ve been working with both the OpenSolaris native version (thank you Nexenta!) and the ZFS-FUSE implementation for Linux. The one thing that proved hard to do was to build a ZFS pool on my USB2 hard drive and move that pool between machines. For a couple of days I struggled in vain to see why I couldn’t ZFS export from my linux box and ZFS import on my OpenSolaris box (or visa versa)....