Our Director pulled us all into a call a couple of months ago because our React front end took almost 20 seconds to load. When pressed for answers one of the devs just said “well they’re international so there’s nothing we can do about that.” We get weekly alerts on our telemetry and logging software of errors due to latency. When pressed by the director the answer is “well it’s platforms problem, there’s nothing we can do.”

These aren’t Junior Engineers btw. These are Senior and staff devs saying that. In the middle of a monolith migration I decided to look into why things are failing…and the “not our problem” excuse? Yeah, I think a lot of it is our problem. For example we have an access check that takes anywhere between 300 to 900 ms. If your page load SLO is 2 seconds you’ve already wasted 59% of your time just checking if the user has access or not.

What bothers me isn’t that we have problems, it’s that the immediate answer is “not our problem” acting like our code is perfect. …

It’s a very specific feeling but it has happened to me few times with big codebases and I find it interesting.

When I join a new company, To get my code through I have to get, rightfully so, through extensive code reviews (sometimes they feel a bit pedantic but never mind).

Then I see code that was merged in the past, sometimes not too long ago, and it’s wouldn’t have ever be accepted with the current standards.

It’s great that the company fixed coding quality but I also find it funny and interesting.

I also generally noticed that coding standards have improved a lot in the past 10-15 years, at least in major companies, probably due to more testing and bureaucracy at the cost of speed.

Unfortunately poor design decisions made a long time ago still curse modern codebases

Hey, I am looking for some senior guidance within my team. I am reviewing a merge request and I can tell it was automatically generated via AI. There are 20 new files being added ~2000 lines, this is taking a lot of my time to review.

In addition to that, the engineer who raised this change created a new pattern rather than using the existing pattern or modifying that pattern to be compatible with his new features. His excuse is that he wants only his pipeline to use his new pattern without affecting the pipelines that uses the exist pattern.

I want to reject his pull request and ask him to split his pull request into reviewable chunks and ask him to use opt-in feature flags in the existing pattern so his pipeline can subscribe to these feature flags - ask him to test this logic in a development environment - then slowly refactor the existing pattern to remove the opt-in flags and do a regression test in the lower environment.

However, I believe management does not care about this …

I’ll start.

Background:

• Worked as a developer for a big unnamed software consulting company.
• Public sector client.
• Client got two million euros of public funding (taxes) to build a web application.
• We won the contract to build the app.
• Won’t go in to detail what it was, but basically the application pulled a bunch of data from a couple of third party API’s, processed the data and then we had a UI for the users to interact with the data.

Sounds straight forward right?

Well first of all, the client had very strict architectural requirements for the application. Those requirements were the bible basically.. The app needed to be scalable (which for them meant microservices) and “platform independent” etc.. We had absolutely no say in any architectural decisions or the direction of the project, we were there to simply make the clients vision into a reality.

Anyway.. for the aforementioned reasons the application architecture was retardedly complex, for …

TL;DR: Would love to learn more about your experience with OpenTelemetry.

Background is data engineering, where there is a clear framework for observability of data systems. I’ve been deeply exploring how to improve collaboration between data and software teams, and OpenTelemetry has come up multiple times in my conversations with SWEs.

I’m not going to pretend I know OpenTelemetry well, and I’m more likely to deal with its output than implement it. With that said, it seems like an area with tremendous overlap between software and data teams that need alignment.

From my research, it seems the framework has gained wide adoption, but the drawbacks are that it’s quite an effort to implement in existing systems and that it’s highly opinionated, so devs spend a lot of time learning to think in the “OpenTelemetry way” for their development. With that said, coming from data engineering, I obviously see the huge value of getting this data.

Have you …

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Hello,

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post here, so I’d like to make an update. If you didn’t already know: Termix is an open-source, forever-free, self-hosted all-in-one server management platform. It provides a multi-platform solution for managing your servers and infrastructure through a single, intuitive interface. Termix offers SSH terminal access, SSH tunneling capabilities, and remote file management, with additional tools to be introduced in the future. Termix is the perfect free and self-hosted alternative to Termius available for all platforms.

As of a few days ago, v1.8.0 has been released. With this update, it means Termix is available for installation on the following platforms, all synced together with the self-hosted Docker container:

• Website (any modern browser on any platform, like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox)
• Windows (x64/ia32)
  • Portable
  • MSI Installer
  • Chocolatey Package Manager (waiting for approval)
• Linux (x64/ia32) …