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diff --git a/posts/2015-09-03-talking-about-technology.org b/posts/2015-09-03-talking-about-technology.org new file mode 100644 index 0000000..248da84 --- /dev/null +++ b/posts/2015-09-03-talking-about-technology.org @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +I'm more and more annoyed by how the tech community is super +enthusiastic about new pieces of technology, and how hard they try to +convince you it's the best next thing in the world. Way too often, at +conferences or meet-ups, the talks tend to glorify a product or a +technology, and only focus on how it will make your life easier. It's +too common to have someone do a demo on stage on how to build, in 5 +minutes, a trivial application running with X many instances in a +container in the cloud and be like "see how easy it was !?". + +What will not be mentioned is how your team is going to transition to +this technology or infrastructure; what are the traps hiding; what will +not work; what are the real limitations (can it scale to more than 10 +instances ? 100 instances ? 10k instances ?); how do you manage it in +your data-center; in your cloud; how easy is it to debug; what are the +current issues that people running it in production have met; what's the +worst case scenario for an incident; how long can it take to recover; +and way too many other things. + +Over the last few days, I binge-watched many of the +[[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVjgeV_avap2arug3vIz8c6l72rvh9poV][MesosCon]]'s' +videos. One of the talk I really enjoyed was by +[[https://twitter.com/Yasumoto][Joseph Smith]]. In +[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNrh-gdu9m4&index=8&list=PLVjgeV_avap2arug3vIz8c6l72rvh9poV][his +talk]], he shared about various ways Mesos and Aurora failed at Twitter. + +Joseph's talk was the opposite of what I described earlier. He mentioned +at length issues and problems we've encountered running Aurora. Some of +the issues he explored were recent (from a couple of weeks ago); some +were pretty old and are fixed by now; and also what would be the worst +case scenario that could happen. This is exactly what I want to hear +when someone introduces a piece of technology. I need to be aware of +them. It doesn't mean that I'm going to be scared and will not use it. + +I believe this is important. The public who come to a talk is, most of +the time, here to learn about a piece of technology. They might have +some prior knowledge, but most of them don't. They want to learn what +can be done with it; how to use it; how it's an improvement. But more +importantly, we need to talk about the cost and path to adopt the piece +of technology. Going from a simple demo running on 2 hosts to a +something running on production with hundred of thousands of users and +on thousands of instances is a different story. + +And yes, these could be questions asked by the public at the end of the +talk. But not everybody feel comfortable asking them out loud in front +of their peers. + +I feel the same way about post-mortems. Companies should share them more +frequently. Some companies are +[[https://github.com/danluu/post-mortems][pretty good about it]]. I can +understand, if your product is not a service for developers, that you +might not want to share them on your blog to not scare your users. But +we should still share them during conferences. Maybe there's even an +opportunity for a meet-up focused on post-Mort em ? + +Talking about issues and how difficult it might be to adopt something is +not doing is disservice to something you really enjoy working with. |
