"But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it."Henry David Thoreau
This quote is over 160 years old. Think about it.
"Now the trumpet summons us again, not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are – but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle..."John F. Kennedy
Since my experiment with 8tracks embedding didn’t go so well, I thought I’d see what this looked like.
Where are the Rails infrastructure support firms?: “Five years ago, the typical Rails stack was just a couple of pieces: Apache/Mongrel, Rails, and MySQL. While Rails is remarkably similar to its original form even today, the stack around it is dramatically more diverse. We’re deploying to automated infrastructures, using NoSQL databases, messaging systems, queuing systems, and more. With the increased complexity of web applications, I’m surprised we’re not seeing companies dedicated to 24/7 infrastructure support: it doesn’t matter where your app is hosted, they manage it.”
This is an area of great interest to me; I am fascinated by the marketplace. I share my skepticism about the form of the business described herein, but have heard of a company or two in the space. The primary issue I see is drawn from my own experience.
I was the lead developer for an application that grew large on my watch. My recollection of the message coming from presentations in the Rails community at the time was “Learn to be fast when you need to, because you probably won’t need to.” While this may be accurate since most projects are failures, it serves you poorly if you later learn that performance is important to you. It deals with capacity (another critical concept, especially in Rails) not at all. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the two equated by the community at large.
So what are the results of this message? Developers are writing applications that can get them into trouble– “design by laptop” has claimed many a deliverable, just that I’m aware of personally. They’re not familiar with operations. Their systems do not count on failure as an outcome. The architecture is poor. Many don’t know that there is a solution. Those that do scratch and claw to find one find that, unlike their development experience so far, tools and systems to increase capacity and performance require a great deal of knowledge to plan for their use. It is a complicated field requiring great study, and some mind-bending. This is the path I’m still walking down, months after leaving that lead developer job to start my own consulting business, and it’s humbling and awe-inspiring all at once.
Part of the issue there is that it can be difficult to find help– as the commenters to that post point out, engineers with this skillset are in-demand among the already in-demand Rails space. Talks on the issue are still rare. I wrote about my love of Chef recently, which includes some exhortations of responsibility on the part of developers, but– let’s get serious– very few are listening to me right now. That’s OK, I’m working on it.
At the end of the day, these issues matter. Knowing what to expect from your operating system, your VM’s, and your architecture is crucial to acceptable response times and uptime when you start getting the traffic that will make your business a success. Shouldn’t our entire community be more interested in ensuring that our applications have an upside? There is no silver bullet for this problem, not even hosting with Engine Yard or Heroku. Shouldn’t we have it as our mission to ensure whoever owns this registration lets it expire?
On Nov. 4, my wife Megan and I went to the kickoff meeting for @CollaborateCLT, the latest brainchild of Bridget Sullivan. After cofounding Ignite Charlotte, she pitched a session at BarCamp Charlotte 4 about taking momentum from these “geek-oriented” events into the rest of the year. I have a deep interest in the Charlotte start-up scene, and I couldn’t agree more with her assessment.
As our participants started to arrive, I was impressed by Bridget’s leadership and selection of first activity. Each member of the group went around and described what they did, and then we went around again and described what we might be able to do for the others at the table. I found that I got to know the others at the table much better in a few moments than I’ve been able to at other networking events.
Then we got to the good stuff! We were encouraged to put forth an idea for a start-up company, which we then discussed as a group. Based on our mix of educators, marketers, technical implementors, and general guidance, I think we left with a product that would really have a strong chance of being funded, should the presenter wish to do so. Megan and I were both excited to get a chance to hopefully work on the project, so hopefully the presenter of the original idea will decide it’s worth more effort, and give it a shot!
This is the definition of collaboration. One person’s idea became everyone’s fascination, and many of us presented our own special knowledge of our chosen domains to great effect. The idea became stronger and stronger. It had established a couple of vendors, multiple marketing channels, and the basis for growing the business considerably year over year. I was stoked to write a business plan and get it in front of investors in town!
To bring this sort of energy to a 90 minute get-together was inspiring. I’ll be sure to promote the next meeting. I’d also love to see some collaboration between Bridget and Les Porter who runs CLTLaunch as I think these projects are perfect matches for each other. Work on your idea collaboratively with others interested in helping one on level, practice your presentation skills and get your idea funded at CLTLaunch. It could work!
Some highlights:
This is what you are paying for.
What are you willing to pay for?
There is a tremendous amount of information in this slide show, and I can only fully contextualize parts of it. Exciting times are ahead.
I couldn’t agree more with the observation that much complexity can be moved up the stack to the HTTP protocol. The tooling around the message’s form and its method of delivery are multiplying in number and accelerating in quality. And you can read the results in your browser, sometimes, too!
NoSQL Is for the Birds: Cloud «: “In most environments, the choice to use a relational store like MySQL or a document database like Riak or a column-oriented database like Cassandra is one of preference, legacy infrastructure, tooling and personnel. Without the same pressures and concerns that created the non-relational alternatives, an endless debate is inevitable, because scale is absent.”
(Via @fastip.)
I’m fascinated by scale, particularly this definition via absence.
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