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D1-2 Charity Majors - A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer to Technical Decison-Making

D1-2 Charity Majors - A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer to Technical Decison-Making

Over the last few years we’ve seen an explosion of complexity, in everything from polyglot storage to composable infrastructure, containerization and microservices, config management vs immutable infrastructure. Until recently there was a set of widely accepted best practices for running in the cloud. But now every element of your stack is a never-ending rabbit hole of possibilities and questions. What’s an engineer or architect or manager to do? 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. We’ll talk about how to identify and prioritize where to be boring and where to innovate … and how to correct course when you’ve made a wrong call.

DevOpsDays Zurich

May 08, 2017
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  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.