Author Topic: Feature velocity  (Read 1080 times)

CultLeader

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Feature velocity
« on: November 28, 2023, 07:21:40 AM »
Today I want to talk about pain that a lot of engineers cause to themselves.

I will tell you right now - no company at a high level gives a tinyest crap about implementation details of any component you create. Someone might say I'm saying that the sky is blue. Apparently not, because the world is infested with yaml abominations and NodeJS.

Let's pick example, there are two NodeJS services. There's a mismatch in how one service calls another and its an error. It turns into a Jira ticket.

Project manager asks what's wrong with that? Engineer says "well, one NodeJS service doesn't know schema of other service, we need to run tests". Poor project manager has to nod head and say "ok ok".

This is bullshit excuse. Your system, oh fellow engineer, who you came up with of hundreds of NodeJS microservices is an abomination and you should feel bad. You're an idiot and it is your fault. When you think about it, if both services were in same executable, in Rust, it would be just compile time error and you'd have to fix it to ship. When services are separated, the exact same error for some reason becomes okay now!

Anytime such excuse comes to light "we can't verify kubernetes deployment yaml hence it errors out know because our helm chart repo is abominable pile of yamls that doesn't work together" its the fault of idiot engineers.

Anything that gets in the way of the high level goals of adding features to make your customers happy is the fault of the engineers. You picked Ruby on Rails garbage and now suffer many production runtime errors because of that? Its your fault. Your system is a repository of crappy incoherent yamls that have no typesafe enforcement so you resort to test environments to catch such errors? It is your fault. You can't deploy new database in 5 minutes with HA, replication and backups and it doesn't interact with your app in a typesafe manner? It is your fault.

Pagan monkeys have this funny idea that every system should be open and you should be allowed to put anything in it, like dynamic type schema registration, dynamic execution hooks or whatever. "Great software is not built, it is grown!". Imbeciles. They're saying that because their mom was an open system, open to 100 different guys that is, and look at them now.

What I do with Eden platform is radically different. There are no incoherent yamls, there's a single source of truth database which can be defined in eden data language or lua (probably also with webassembly in the future if there's need). I already implemented AWS terraform code generation, which uses AWS transit gateway if you have more than one datacenter in AWS, but uses wireguard to connect to all other clouds. I'll implement 6 more clouds for the initial version and they'll all talk together via wireguard VPN with high availability and OSPF routing since day one (you can't deploy half-assed no production ready configurations in Eden platform).

You see, since I said from the very beginning, if something doesn't work in production in Eden platform its my fault as an engineer. It is much more difficult to catch all errors during compile time than just leave users swearing and sweating in production due to runtime errors caused by incorrect configurations. Now I have no excuse like today's yaml fags. So I can actually solve these problems by analyzing data in eden platform compiler which tells me within second if my data is wrong. It tells me instantly with compile time error, that I deployed all DB instances only in single datacenter, which should be scattered around datacenters in region to tolerate DC loss. It tells me instantly if query application is using is no longer correct because schema changed. It tells me instantly if one frontend app link no longer can reach other frontend app page during compilation.

So all of these just become compile time errors. So guess what happens with feature velocity? Since all of the previous excuses become compile time errors there's no reason why you couldn't implement REST call to another service in 5 minutes - compiler tells you instantly schema is changed or is incorrect because we took responsibility. Compiler will tell us instantly if prometheus alert is using non existing series. Compiler tells us instantly that we forgot to configure virtual router IP in certain datacenters and clouds where it is needed.

What an old experienced SRE had to do himself by knowing of the system now compiler tells us to do simply it has all the information together.

So what should you do for the rest of the time once you're using Eden platform (hope to release initial version next year finally)? You just develop features and everything works together from day one. And you can do work of 100 engineers alone now. I'm very excited to release this project next year as no one ever done this and it will radically change the way things are done now. Most yaml masturbating excuse engineers - you're likely to get fired soon.

Have a good day bois!