Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …

A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to Technical Decision-Making

A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer to Technical Decision-Making

devopsdays msp, 2016

Charity Majors

July 24, 2016
Tweet

More Decks by Charity Majors

Other Decks in Technology

Transcript

  1. 2005 “Would you care to come over and discuss service

    oriented architectures and REST APIs? Over tea, perhaps.” “Splendid! And have you heard of this ‘NoSQL’ oddity?” “I am sure tis but a passing fad.”
  2. Software is the enemy • Every piece of software adds

    fragility and points of failure • Everything you write will need to be debugged and maintained • It is easy to add software, and hard to remove it
  3. Resist software sprawl. Can you solve the problem with your

    existing tools? h/t @jessitron: http://blog.codeship.com/growing-tech-stack-say-no/
  4. Optimize globally, not locally If you pick the perfect language/storage

    solution for every local problem, you will have an unmanageable mess.
  5. Have a gating process for major new components • What

    is the relative gain? • Manufacture friction if necessary • Don’t micromanage outside the critical path
  6. Choose boring technology! • Failure modes are well understood •

    Rich library support for languages • For databases, extensive production hardening • Tooling and support for observability, debugging h/t @mcfunley, http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
  7. Understand your appetite for risk • Early startups have massively

    greater tolerance for risk. • Use that risk! But spend it on your core differentiators.
  8. more considerations: • Can you pay someone to do it

    better, for cheaper? Value your own team’s time. • Replacing a thing? Great: define a timeline and get rid of the old thing. • You *should* give preference to things your team has expertise with. • Fuck hacker news.
  9. Are they friendly and welcoming? Do they have a code

    of conduct, do they deal with assholes effectively? Do they value new contributors or are they tribal and snobby? It is totally legitimate to make software choices that are influenced by the quality of the community.
  10. Operational Impact The more mature your company becomes, the more

    your technical choices must be driven by operational impact. Corollary: make as many ops problems as possible not your problem.
  11. Manifesto: 1. Technology serves the mission. 2. Reuse solutions. 3.

    Create friction for adding new components. 4. Choose boring technology, when you can. 5. Spend your risk tokens on key differentiators. 6. The longer you survive, the more operational impact trumps all.