A Young Lady's Primer to Technical Decision-Making

Software is eating the world and probably your brain.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen an explosion of complexity in areas like polyglot storage, composable infrastructure, containerization and microservices, and coupling platforms (*aaS). Even five years ago, there were a set of fairly widely accepted best practices (virtualization, config management, RESTful services, and DBMS), but now every element of your stack is a never-ending rabbit hole of possibilities and questions.

Solid technical judgment is more important than ever. You can’t anticipate every problem, but you can identify and head off many of them in advance.

Transcript

1. A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer to Architecture and Technical Decision-Making Charity Majors, honeycomb.io @mipsytipsy
3. “Software is eating the world” ~pmarca “and your brain, probably” ~me
4. Making better choices with software.
6. 2000 “u can haz LAMP stack”
7. 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.”
8. 2010-2013ish Infrastructure Virtualization Config management RDBMS Services with REST APIs Continuous integration/delivery Agile “DevOps”
9. 2016: welcome to the jungle even more logos
10. Accelerating trends in 2016 Polyglot storage Composable infrastructure Containerization, microservices Coupling platforms (*aaS) Storing more and more data forever
11. Cambrian Explosion of technical complexity
12. the paradox of choice this is actually really hard on humans.
14. tips for making better technical decisions
15. Technology serves the mission
16. 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
17. Resist software sprawl. Can you solve the problem with your existing tools? h/t @jessitron: http://blog.codeship.com/growing-tech-stack-say-no/
18. Optimize globally, not locally If you pick the perfect language/storage solution for every local problem, you will have an unmanageable mess.
19. Have a gating process for major new components • What is the relative gain? • Manufacture friction if necessary • Don’t micromanage outside the critical path
20. 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
21. Understand your appetite for risk • Early startups have massively greater tolerance for risk. • Use that risk! But spend it on your core differentiators.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. Celebrate the engineers who remove code, deprecate, and refactor, as much as those who add features.
26. 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.
28. remember, it’s gonna be worse by 2017. <3
29. thanks kids! enjoy #velocityconf! thanks to@jessitron, @mcfunley and @ferlatte ~ @mipsytipsy