Wherein I package my gut feelings about the tech industry as insider information.
I’m not entirely sure how to begin this one; I know what I want to say, but I’m not sure how to descend into that madness without being incredibly blunt. Usually, I’d start with some sort of short personal story or a parable, or some kind of recent news reference, but there’s none of that here. This piece is really just a culmination of some growing concerns I’ve been having for the past year or so about the state of the DevOps/SRE industry, so I guess I’m left with being blunt: the state of the industry is terrible.
Orchestrated Homogenization
There’s a…
In 2021, do serverless, PaaS, and no-code solutions make containers obsolete?
When sitting down to start a new project, or figuring out a road map for an existing one, the options for actually running your workloads have never been more wide open. Admittedly, we live in an era where we are spoiled for choice when it comes to platforms; between open-source tools, paid services, enterprise offerings, and everything else available. This has made selecting the tools we use a bit more difficult as the chances of being paralyzed by choice grow with the number of choices available. With the growing number of options available to us these days its only fair…
Not really a full post, more of an update, but here it goes.
I’ve decided that this year, for at least the whole of 2021, I will do my best to publish two articles a week: Monday and Thursday. While most of these articles will be around tech, development, and devops, a small percentage of them might deal with politics (more specifically, tech in politics), or some other random subject. This is my personal blog, so I don’t really have to follow any rules, but I want to stay as close to tech as possible.
As always, I’m open to topic requests. I’m sure the 24 people who read my blog are super interested in my opinions.
- Pete
A study on cloud instance size, performance, and cost.
The Premise
As a cloud architect one of the things you have to constantly be aware of is your cloud spend. How much you’re spending and what your budget is has a very real impact on a number of different areas, including what kind of performance you can expect out of your infrastructure and, by extension, your applications. Designing an architecture that not only fits your monetary budget but also your performance budget and is something that is easy to manage, operate, and troubleshoot can be a tall order at times. The best architects find a way to balance all of these…
CAVEAT: Let me start off with this so no one misunderstands or spins the title of this thing: the global pandemic we find ourselves in, and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused it, are one of the worst things that have happened to the modern world. Half a million people (and counting) have died from it and there’s no planet or scenario where this is acceptable. But as someone who has absolutely no control over any of this its up to me (and you) to try to find positive outcomes of this experience.
Sometimes it takes an Act of God to…
What drives you?
Back in 2000-something, when I was first contemplating the career change from logistics to IT, whenever I would talk about what’s next for me I always felt a little disingenuous. Whenever someone would ask me what prompted my career change I would rattle off the usual answers of “I want to do something different”, “I’ve always been into computers, so it just makes sense”, or something along those lines. Never would I indulge myself in simply responding with my real reason: I needed the money. And, if we’re being honest, a lot of career choices can come down to money…
We get stuck in ruts, the developer’s version of the yips, and sometimes we don’t know how to get out. Here’s four ideas on things you can do to try and get out and grow as a developer.
We should, both as developers and as people, always be striving to learn and grow. Through self-discovery and self-motivation we can learn to be better people and better professionals. By expanding our areas of knowledge we expose ourselves to new ideas, new worldviews, new challenges, and new questions to be answered. So in that spirit I’ve put together a short list of things that would make good topics for your next 2 AM rabbit hole or self-paced learning session.
Multi-threading in Python
If you’re a Python developer you should absolutely learn about threading. “But doesn’t Python have the GIL, so threading is basically…
Go is the COVID-19 of languages; it spread really fast, it didn’t seem that bad at first, but it sucks and I hate it.
Most of my time over the past two years has been developing primary in Go. If you’re not familiar with the Go programming language let me sum it up for you real quick: take a modern, statically-linked, type-strict language and remove every advancement in development in the last 10 years or so, do some pretentious talks about how your language is the best one out there, and you have Go. Now, don’t get me wrong, Go is a fantastic language. The problem is that its also a horrible language.
Error Handling
In Go, errors are “bubbled up” to the top of the…
The new development and technology podcast
As an extension and a logical continuation of my work here on Medium I’ve just released episode 1 of my new podcast Error Is Nil. In episode 1 I discuss company culture and it’s impact on your business as well as how I think Agile/Scrum is broken.
Please give it a listen here:
Five more things that make your life as a developer easier, saner, and overall more enjoyable
Based on the wild success of the first “5 Rules of Code”, here are five more rules that you should try to follow. I mean, unless you like doing things the hard way, then, by all means, carry on.
1. Commit Often, Push Always
As we covered in the first five rules, you should be using Git branches in your repository.
My preferred strategy is to have short-lived feature branches — think of them as sandboxes. It doesn’t matter how messy or disorganized the sandbox gets, as long as all the sand stays in the sandbox, everyone’s happy.
For feature branches, as long as the…
Peter Christian Fraedrich
Entrepreneur, software developer, writer, musician, amateur luthier, husband, dad. All opinions are my own.
