I got a bit of reading in over the holidays despite being in Antarctica! We had Starlink on the ship. :)

  • Mastodon thread about a monolith app architecture vs microservices: Haven’t gotten tired of reading these yet. Turns out it depends is the answer to whether you should. Complexity in the system goes up and the operational overhead too. Make sure it’ll actually make everyone’s life easier.
  • What is this thing called Profiling?: Java flight recorder is designed to be a low overhead monitoring tool for java programs. Target is in the 1% or less overhead range which is usually as much as you’d ever allow in prod. Reading a book called Understanding Software Dynamics now which is all about this stuff.
  • On Premises with DHH: An amazing conversation about where we came from as technologists (not ancient history - only the last 10-15 yrs or so) and where we are today in terms of choosing the platforms we run on. On-prem makes a bunch of sense for lots of use cases and contexts. Cloud hosting does too but there’s a big cost to it and a loss of … self-determination? in some ways. Another topic near and dear to my heart is the explosive growth in complexity of our systems and the recent desirability of this kind of inertia. Sigh. :)
  • Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound: Wow.

In his book, Rushkoff criticizes what he calls “the mindset”—a belief that “with enough money and technology, wealthy men can live as gods and transcend the calamities that befall everyone else.” In doing so, he writes, they apply the same exit strategy of Silicon Valley startups to civilization itself.

“If anybody has enough money to insulate himself from the damage created for society, it would be Zuck,” says Rushkoff. “That’s sort of what it is. He’s destroyed the government and society, and now he can go to Hawaii and build a fort.”