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by flippinburgers 1955 days ago
I like to believe that experience will eventually drive people towards using scientific parsimony when creating solutions to engineering problems.

I don't think over-engineering is the only problem: shiny-new. Shiny-new syndrome wherein the typically junior programmer cannot help but jump from one new thing to the next, advocating that some new system must use the new tech that they recently discovered. While the enthusiasm is ok, working with people like this can be a drag.

Another problem: we are facebook too! In the sense that small companies heartily believe that they actually have problems at the scale of a company like facebook (or will ever get to that level). Again, hearing someone say, "We should do xyz because Netflix does it!" makes me want to give up on this profession.

1 comments

> Another problem: we are facebook too! In the sense that small companies heartily believe that they actually have problems at the scale of a company like facebook (or will ever get to that level).

Precisely! It's tiresome how many people setup Kubernetes for a network of 2-6 computers.

I was with you once, but last year's I got tired when people set up networks of 2-6 computers with daemons that run in a wildly different ways, and it's not clear how to fix their failures, where configs and metrics and logs are. I'd honestly prefer overengineered kubernetes setup nkw, only for some more standard way of doing things between projects.
That's a false dichotomy though. Having a standard way of doing things between projects does not require running a complex distributed system with dozens of pieces all engaged in constant chatter. It's a testament to the failings of our profession that we apparently cannot agree on a sane baseline toolset less complicated than Kubernetes.
Infrastructure as code is much easier to handle than full backups of the configuration of your mutable machines, even for 1 machine.

The only problem it has (and why I don't use stuff like kubernetes at home) is that the configuration formats aren't stable and thus require a lot of ongoing maintenance.