Articles tagged with software



Simple sabotage for software

CIA produced a fantastic book during the peak of World War 2 called Simple Sabotage. It laid out various ways for infiltrators to ruin productivity of a company. Some of the advice is timeless, for instance the section about “General interference with Organizations and Production”:

What I have been working on: Modal

Long story short: I'm working on a super cool tool called Modal. Please check it out — it lets you run things in the cloud without having to think about infrastructure. Scaling out, scheduling, containerization, using GPUs, setting up webhooks, and all kinds of other stuff.

σ-driven project management: when is the optimal time to give up?

Hi! It's your friendly project management theorician. You might remember me from blog posts such as Why software projects take longer than you think, which is a blog post I wrote a long time ago positing that software projects completion time follow a log-normal distribution.

Storm in the stratosphere: how the cloud will be reshuffled

Here's a theory I have about cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP): Cloud vendors1 will increasingly focus on the lowest layers in the stack: basically leasing capacity in their data centers through an API. Other pure-software providers will build all the stuff on top of it.

Software infrastructure 2.0: a wishlist

Software infrastructure (by which I include everything ending with *aaS, or anything remotely similar to it) is an exciting field, in particular because (despite what the neo-luddites may say) it keeps getting better every year! I love working with something that moves so quickly.

Giving more tools to software engineers: the reorganization of the factory

It's a popular attitude among developers to rant about our tools and how broken things are. Maybe I'm an optimistic person, because my viewpoint is the complete opposite! I had my first job as a software engineer in 1999, and in the last two decades I've seen software engineering changing in ways that have made us orders of magnitude more productive.

Developer experience as a competitive advantage

I spent a ton of time looking at different software providers, both as a CTO, and as a nerd “advanced” consumer who builds stuff in my spare time. In the last 10 years, there has been an order of magnitude more products that cater directly to developers, through APIs, SDKs, and tooling.

Data architecture vs backend architecture

A modern tech stack typically involves at least a frontend and backend but relatively quickly also grows to include a data platform. This typically grows out of the need for ad-hoc analysis and reporting but possibly evolves into a whole oil refinery of cronjobs, dashboards, bulk data copying, and much more.

The hacker's guide to uncertainty estimates

It started with a tweet: New years resolution: every plot I make during 2018 will contain uncertainty estimates — Erik Bernhardsson (@bernhardsson) January 7, 2018 Why? Because I've been sitting in 100,000,000 meetings where people endlessly debate whether the monthly number of widgets is going up or down, or whether widget method X is more productive than widget method Y.

I don't want to learn your garbage query language

This is a bit of a rant but I really don't like software that invents its own query language. There's a trillion different ORMs out there. Another trillion databases with their own query language. Another trillion SaaS products where the only way to query is to learn some random query DSL they made up.

Plotting author statistics for Git repos using Git of Theseus

I spent a few days during the holidays fixing up a bunch of semi-dormant open source projects and I have a couple of blog posts in the pipeline about various updates. First up, I made a number of fixes to Git of Theseus which is a tool (written in Python) that generates statistics about Git repositories.

The software engineering rule of 3

Here's a dumb extremely accurate rule I'm postulating* for software engineering projects: *you need at least 3 examples before you solve the right problem*. This is what I've noticed: Don't factor out shared code between two classes.

Optimizing for iteration speed

I've written before about the importance of iterating quickly but I didn't necessarily talk about some concrete things you can do. When I've built up the tech team at Better, I've intentionally optimized for fast iteration speed above almost everything else.

The eigenvector of "Why we moved from language X to language Y"

I was reading yet another blog post titled “Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y>” (I forgot which one) and I started wondering if you can generalize it a bit. Is it possible to generate a N * N contingency table of moving from language X to language Y?

The half-life of code & the ship of Theseus

As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old code slowly over time? In order to understand this, I built a little thing to analyze Git projects, with help from the formidable GitPython project.

State drift

I generally haven't written much about software architecture. People make heuristics into religion. But here is something I thought about: how to build in self-correction into systems. This has been something just vaguely sitting in my head lacking a clear conceptual definition until a whole slew of things popped up today that all had the exact same issue at its core.

Iterate or die

Here's a conclusion I've made building consumer products for many years: the speed at which a company innovates is limited by its iteration speed. I don't even mean throughput here. I just mean the cycle time.

I believe in the 10x engineer, but...

The easiest way to be a 10x engineer is to make 10 other engineers 2x more efficient. Someone can be a 10x engineer if they do nothing for 364 days then convinces the team to change programming language to a 2x more productive language.

Installing TensorFlow on AWS

Curious about Google's newly released TensorFlow? I don't have a beefy GPU machine, so I spent some time getting it to run on EC2. The steps on how to reproduce it are pretty brutal and I wouldn't recommend going through it unless you want to waste five hours of your live.

Software Engineers and Automation

Every once in a while when talking to smart people the topic of automation comes up. Technology has made lots of occupations redundant, so what's next? Switchboard operator, a long time ago What about software engineers?

Ping the world

I just pinged a few million random IP addresses from my apartment in NYC. Here's the result: Some notes: What's going on with Sweden? Too much torrenting? Ireland is likewise super slow, but not Northern Ireland Eastern Ukraine is also super slow, maybe not surprising given current events.

The relationship between commit size and commit message size

Wow I guess it was more than a year ago that I tweeted this. Crazy how time flies by. Anyway, here's my rationale: When I update one line of code I feel like I have to put in a long explanation about its side effects, why it's fully backwards compatible, and why it fixes some issue #xyz.