And you are here why?

Many years ago, when I was wood-working, one of my projects was an oak side-table. I spent months on it — hour after hour, night after night, bringing it to the correct finish. There was a kind of zen-like quality to the work, an introspective meditative state that I would be in, that would help ease away the daily burdens and leave me curiously refreshed. Oh, I’m glad I built that table — I still have it — but  the entirety of that experience was about building the table . The journey truly was the reward. And then I think about AWS. The entirety of my DevOps-y life with AWS has consisted of mastering an increasing number of bells and whistles associated with VPCs, ELBs, ECR, ECS, and whatnot. And that’s before you even get to the  Things That Are Not Three Letter Acronyms  like Aurora, Fargate, Snowflake, Aurora, and such-like. And, somewhere along the way, I realized that I had successfully confused the mastering of a complex process with the joy of delivering th...

All you need to get the code JustRight™ is some alone time, right? Far from the madding (open-office) crowd, free from (slack) distractions, just you, your laptop, and StackOverflow. Which is probably, maybe usually, fair, as long as that is literally the case, i.e.,   there is nobody else involved!   Because, of course, once there are other people involved, things change. Take the opposite case, where it’s not just “your code”, but “y’all’s system”, where there are a bunch-a components, each being worked on by a team of peoples, all co-ordinating to get to the hallowed land. Here the best way to Get It Done is, by definition,   complicated , right? Well, actually, it’s   complex   (and also complicated, for that matter), and the difference between the two terms is the difference between being consistently successful and… not . First, a brief description Complicated   systems are deterministic, all the components of the system interact with each oth...