Keep Track Of Your Dependencies!

-
Do you know what your component’s dependencies are?
OK, fine, you know, but does everybody else on your team know?
Great, they know too. Now for the really important part — does what you know match what theyknow?
You’d be surprised how often that semantic mismatchhappens. The folks working on component XXX need to temporarily persist stuff, and use the postgres infrastructure that the component YYY folks are so conveniently running in production.
Which is awesome, right up to the point that the component YYY folks finish their migration to ElasticSearch, and deprecate postgres…
The moral of the story — document (and share!) the design assumptions behind the architecture across all your teams. Whats more, on a fairly regular basis, reassess these assumptions, and see if anything needs to be added, updated, or removed!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her...
Read more

Spot The Difference — Deep Learning Edition

-
Image
You’ve played  Spot The Difference  at some point, right? (Of course you did. We  all  did  ). Think about what you actually did when you were trying to Spot The Difference — in fact, just do it again with SpongeBob juggling above. You’re probably doing something like 1. Quick glance to the left. 2. Quick glance to the right 3. “ Spatula on the left. Wonder if there is one on the right? ” 4. “ Yup, there is. Sriracha on the right. Is that on the left? ” 5. “ Nope! It’s a ketchup bottle on the left! And there is nothing on the plate below it! ” etc. To summarize, what you’re basically doing is looking at each image alternately, identifying objects in each image, and trying to find the same object in the other image. As it turns out, what most Deep Learning systems do is something quite different. They basically do something like this 1. Figure out everything in the first image (“ ketchup bottle at 1 o-clock, empty plate at 3 o-clock, spatula at 1...
Read more