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I recently had the pleasure of reading anthropologist David Graeber’s 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Graeber defines a bullshit job as, a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels … Continue reading Is ops a bullshit job?
Ask an engineering leader about their incident response protocol and they’ll tell you about their severity scale. “The first thing we do is we assign a severity to the incident,” they’ll say, “so the right people will get notified.” And this is sensible. In order to figure out whom to get involved, decision makers need … Continue reading Incident SEV scales are a waste of time
Queues are not just architectural widgets that you can insert into your architecture wherever they're needed. Queues are spontaneously occurring phenomena, just like a waterfall or a thunderstorm.
I was recently delighted to be interviewed by Adam Hawkins on his podcast Small Batches. We discussed a huge variety of topics. Here is the full episode, and on that page you’ll find meticulously timestamped links to specific topics. Check out the rest of Adam’s podcast, it’s phenomenal!
We often don't realize how noisy the errors have gotten until things are already well out of hand. After all, we've got shit to do. Deadlines to hit. By the time we decide to get serious about error management, a huge, impenetrable, meaningless backlog of errors has already accumulated. I call this stuff "slag."
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I know I said we'd be back to normal newsletters this week and in fact had 80% of one already written. Then I unearthed something that was better left buried. Blog post here, Patreon notes here (Mostly an explanation of how I found this horror in the first place). Next week I'll send what was supposed to be this week's piece. (PS: April Cools in three weeks!)
Ask any B2C SaaS founder what metric they’d like to improve and most will say reducing churn. However, proactively reducing churn is a difficult task. I’ll outline the approach we’ve taken at Jenni AI to go from ~17% to 9% churn over the past year. We are still a work in progress but hopefully you’ll […] The post Notes on Improving Churn appeared first on Marc Astbury.
Meditation is easy when you know what to do: absolutely nothing! It's hard at first, like trying to look at the back of your own head, but there's a knack to it.
Discover why 'if not mylist' is twice as fast as 'len(mylist) == 0' by examining CPython's VM instructions and object memory access patterns.
In a fit of frustration, I wrote the first version of Kamal in six weeks at the start of 2023. Our plan to get out of the cloud was getting bogged down in enterprisey pricing and Kubernetes complexity. And I refused to accept that running our own hardware had to be that expensive or that convoluted. So I got busy building a cheap and simple alternative. Now, just two years later, Kamal is deploying every single application in our entire heritage fleet, and everything in active development. Finalizing a perfectly uniform mode of deployment for every web app we've built over the past two decades and still maintain. See, we have this obsession at 37signals: That the modern build-boost-discard cycle of internet applications is a scourge. That users ought to be able to trust that when they adopt a system like Basecamp or HEY, they don't have to fear eviction from the next executive re-org. We call this obsession Until The End Of The Internet. That obsession isn't free, but it's worth it. It means we're still operating the very first version of Basecamp for thousands of paying customers. That's the OG code base from 2003! Which hasn't seen any updates since 2010, beyond security patches, bug fixes, and performance improvements. But we're still operating it, and, along with every other app in our heritage collection, deploying it with Kamal. That just makes me smile, knowing that we have customers who adopted Basecamp in 2004, and are still able to use the same system some twenty years later. In the meantime, we've relaunched and dramatically improved Basecamp many times since. But for customers happy with what they have, there's no forced migration to the latest version. I very much had all of this in mind when designing Kamal. That's one of the reasons I really love Docker. It allows you to encapsulate an entire system, with all of its dependencies, and run it until the end of time. Kind of how modern gaming emulators can run the original ROM of Pac-Man or Pong to perfection and eternity. Kamal seeks to be but a simple wrapper and workflow around this wondrous simplicity. Complexity is but a bridge — and a fragile one at that. To build something durable, you have to make it simple.
