#450 – December 12, 2021
Put the "Flow" in Your Workflows with Shortcut
Most project management tools are either too simple for a growing engineering team or too complex for anyone to want to use them. Shortcut is different. It's project management built specifically for software teams that's fast, intuitive, flexible, powerful, and many other nice, positive adjectives. Delight the scrum gods and give it a try for free.
Common infrastructure errors I've made
One surreal experience as my career has progressed is the intense feeling of deja vu you get hit with during meetings. From time to time, someone will mention something and you'll flash back to the same meeting you had about this a few jobs ago. A decision was made then, a terrible choice that ruined months of your working life. You spring back to the present day, almost bolting out of your chair to object, "Don't do X!". Your colleagues are startled by your intense reaction, but they haven't seen the horrors you have.
Rockstar is a computer programming language designed for creating programs that are also hair metal power ballads.
How does Shopify traffic looks like on Cyber Monday
Shopify achieved near-perfect uptime while averaging ~30TB/min of egress traffic across our infrastructure. That’s a massive ~43PB/day!
Queue despair: Ordering and poison messages
It's taken me a long time to admit it, but I don't think I know how to do asynchronous programming. In theory, I'm a huge fan of the decoupling it offers in the face of complexity: simple independent components come together to build the whole. And it's not just theory, the benefits are numerous and real. The problem is that it doesn't always work and it isn't always obvious how to handle edge-cases. It's gotten to the point where I'm pretty sure that I don't know what I'm doing.
I am, at best, a developer of average ability. I wish it wasn't true, I wish I was one of those genius developers, but I'm not. So I work with what I have.