Exponential growth and shipping - 123dev #37

Posted on October 12, 2021  •  3 minutes  • 533 words

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Shipping products

This past week I was part of the team that launched EKS Anywhere. Launching an open source project was something I really wanted to do to see how it was different from products and services I’ve helped launch in the past.

The biggest difference for me was it’s really refreshing to point people to GitHub for issues and to let people use the software for free. The users I got to talk to were fellow infrastructure engineers which also made it really easy to talk about the project because I am personally familiar to the problems it solves.

Exponential growth (or decay)

Humans are really bad at estimating a lot of things. Exponential growth is one of the hardest things for people to understand. I’ve seen countless graphs with slow growth curves that have caused enormous outages. I’m thankful no system I have been responsible for has caused any physical harm to people.

The 60 minutes after the Titanic hit the iceberg it was reasonable for people to think everything was going to be fine. However, there was nothing you could do to stop it. It was a tragic and unfortunately similar events have happened since and will happen in the future.

Links

This is good advice if you’re looking to change roles or companies. Finding interesting problems is more important than interesting technology.

It’s also important to note your resume you should focus on the problems you solved, not the technologies you worked with. Listing technologies will get you past the resume filters, but focusing on the technologies during the interview is a good way to make sure you don’t get opportunities grow. Focus on value you bring to a role based on the problems you’ve solved. The technology is just an implementation detail.

Work on interesting problems. Not interesting technologies. - Rukshan’s Blog — ruky.me When I first began learning programming with basic and pascal, our computer class started teaching us Java. As for a 10 year old it was hard for me to grasp the concept of object oriented programming. It took me another 10 years to partially grasp the concept of OOP, and another 10 years to completely…

I wrote the example hello-eks-anywhere “app” and I learned how to make nginx route to different folders depending on the user agent. This made the user experience better because you could deploy the same app and curl it to get a text based document that looked good in the terminal, or you could open a browser to see an HTML page. I did the same thing with the hello-app-runner app I wrote but that was implemented in Python.

hello-eks-anywhere/default.conf at main · aws-containers/hello-eks-anywhere · GitHub — github.com Example application to deploy to your first EKS Anywhere cluster - hello-eks-anywhere/default.conf at main · aws-containers/hello-eks-anywhere

I use a lot of git aliases. It’s fair to say I use more aliases than I do native commands. This post had some aliases I never thought to add even though I have similar workflows.

My favorite git aliases - Lazy Electron Consulting I tend to use git from the command line frequently. There’s a useful feature to reduce repetitive work called git aliases: