From 63f413891d5adc596e4d51dfba4d0d23fdea3ca4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Franck Cuny Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 10:16:40 -0700 Subject: Stop generating a static site. --- posts/2015-09-03-talking-about-technology.md | 45 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 45 insertions(+) create mode 100644 posts/2015-09-03-talking-about-technology.md (limited to 'posts/2015-09-03-talking-about-technology.md') diff --git a/posts/2015-09-03-talking-about-technology.md b/posts/2015-09-03-talking-about-technology.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..80a5538 --- /dev/null +++ b/posts/2015-09-03-talking-about-technology.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +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 +[MesosCon](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVjgeV_avap2arug3vIz8c6l72rvh9poV)'s' videos. One of the +talk I really enjoyed was by [Joseph Smith](https://twitter.com/Yasumoto). In [his +talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNrh-gdu9m4&index=8&list=PLVjgeV_avap2arug3vIz8c6l72rvh9poV), +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 [pretty good about it](https://github.com/danluu/post-mortems). 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. -- cgit v1.2.3