staofbur

Not quite. We scaled it to 50x the user count at the same time.

iOS reminders, notes and Siri. I run a financial/budget spreadsheet in Numbers. Shopping comes via Ocado.

Yes. I saw the last days of a VMS cluster (actual VAX not Alpha) system being ported to windows/vb/com/asp. The speed difference was actually incredible. It ended up on a mediocre single Xeon 500MHz P3.

At the end of the day, the windows based system was just as reliable as far as nines went and tens of times faster.

This was only just recently replaced with asp.net I understand. They got nearly 20 years out of each rewrite.

That doesn't happen because you don't let them have the credential vault keys. In fact no humans get them; just the build and deployment pipeline.

The trick is to make sure that if the credentials do leak they are useless.

Yes it was a "hardware lock" i.e. the holder of the spoon was allowed to diff their copy with the master on a file share and update that. The spoon was used as a casual weapon to beat idiots as well in jest ;)

Ansible vault, separate repository to the code and you're fine. You're up shit creek if you lose your code too unless you're 100% perfect so there is no distinction in policy.

Hell if you're using vault you might as well chuck the config in with the code. The vault key distribution is what needs to be controlled.

It's perfectly reasonable to put your credentials and configuration into a VCS if any secrets are in ansible vault or something similar.

I reckon they either stuffed it all in as plain text or someone got hold of their source code and found a stupid hole in it and just read the database file off the front end somewhere. It's not unusual for the unclued to stick a database dump on a front facing web server with a "secret url" and just pull that down with curl or something.

Hey, the spoon worked well, until I bought another one and left it in the office :) They had SVN running for everyone a week after and a month later they were running feature branches.

I'm always late to the party. I'm the cleanup team :)

You can, hence my comment about silos. The interface is rarely well defined enough to be able to abstract it over a network boundary from experience. One of the things I see in a lot of monoliths is leaky abstractions and they are really difficult to reign in.

We tend to go for throwing related web front and and API endpoints into the same ball of mud silo and back end that directly with the storage and cache services. We scale those silos up and partition across tenants too. I think a couple of the silos are around the 1 million LoC size now as well.

I'd argue it's cheaper scaling out the monolith or introducing isolated functional silos and scaling them out than even bothering migrating everything to microservices. Also you certainly can't port a complex monolith to microservices; you have to start again. We're quite happily able to shift 15,000 requests/sec from over 2000 http endpoints with a monolith and our kit is at ~20% capacity. Need more? Slice up a silo some more.

Key aspect when you design the monolith is not building a spaghetti monster. If X doesn't need to talk to Y, put a wall there (package level)

Indeed. Apparently some of the human race loves suffering!

To be honest, even though we were just pulling TortoiseSVN into most of the companies, some people just couldn't figure it out even after being bought books, reading the manual AND sitting in training sessions for hours where we hand-held them through every day use cases.

A lot of the companies, software was a function of the business, not the business itself. There was no motivation for the staff to do anything other than minimal effort or even research what their job was about. There was no pride, no ingenuity or creativity. Inevitably this descended into chaos and then I got hired to unfuck the places. Some places you couldn't fix because they were too cheap, too lazy and didn't want to make a change because they were in denial that the poo was actually already over the fan blades.

It was depressing and if I'm honest it made me physically ill and I folded the company and got a permanent job with a company that wielded the clue stick.

Feel much better now :)

About 50% of the companies I consulted for between 2004-2013 had no issue tracker. Most emailed and/or emailed spreadsheets around.

What's even more shocking is about 25% of them didn't even use a VCS, most relying on some poor guy to sit there with a diff tool and merge everyone's shit into something cohesive. One company used a wooden spoon as an ownership lock.

Good spot. BMJ won't be crowing that one though.

I had a 50-odd CD set of voyager data dumps from NASA once. Not sure what happened to them but the data was out there and obtainable.

Edit: turns out you can download at least some of them from archive.org! https://archive.org/details/VoyagerstotheOuterPlanetsVol5

We did that. They were still finger pointing two hours later.

Legal guys said it wasn't worth suing them because we'd have to pay up then or lose the support contract.

Yeah a big chunk of that was consultancy, support, Oracle licenses. TCO was going to be around £500k for 5 years.

The whole platform got replaced with SQL Server on a clone PC server in the end which cost less than £10k. No fan of Microsoft but there was no competition. And the tooling was far better!

Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle.

I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London and she was still angry about it 17 years later!

And that's what Oracle does to your soul :)

Edit: that N class and Oracle NEVER got deployed in the end. It just sat there unused, licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity and it got chucked in a skip after 5 years. About £200k of expenditure down the pan.

This is incidentally where .Net was around the 1.1 release (2003ish) We had code generation frameworks kicking out swathes of boiler plate.

Now Repository<T> and for us around 200,000 lines of code are gone and only one narrow set of tests to execute.

Another bit of advice I can give from dealing with a few particularly shitty vendors is that if you can't actually download a copy from their web site or extract one from their sales team and see it in action yourself, they have something to hide.

This is usually cost escalators, a really poor deployment and management story, an upsold incomplete product or just a wall of lies.

Also refuse to buy a license until you trial it on your own kit.

Acorn delivered proper WYSIWYG that actually worked on RiscOS around the same time. Everyone else was still playing with WordPerfect. TechWriter depicted below and impression were ridiculously powerful:

http://www.mw-software.com/icon-tech/Products/TechWriter/Tec...

So while your peers were just about getting a 386 with DOS/windows 3, you had a 32-bit ARM workstation with full anti aliased font rendering and production grade print capability.

Shame the kernel was poo and the file system so disparate to everything else or it may have taken off.

Well you buy one RHEL and use centos everywhere then pretend whatever broke was on your RHEL licensed box. That's usually how corporates seem to run it.

I haven't seen a single Fedora install in all my years on a desktop or server.

Yeah I burned hours on powertop and TLP.

Thanks have passed your details on to our expert in this space.

For the public record this was mainly down to the problem of client reliability and migrating data live when there are 8,000 people hammering it with reads and writes. We went for a read/write through system and background synchronisation. The latter we had real reliability problems with and the upload performance wasn't great.

Also ROI didn't stack up in the end versus our SAN so we canned it.

I work for a Fortune 500 and we don't like it either.

Excellent. I'll play with that and see how it feels now.

I've been building windows applications, right down from Win32/ATL/MFC/C++/DCOM and up to C#/WPF/ASP.Net for 25 years and managed teams of 80+ developers. I can drive windows in my sleep. It's not that. It's a fundamental quality issue caused by a combination of tangled complexity and framework schizophrenia.

It's just crap at storing files!