Cindy Sridharan
11.7K posts
Cindy Sridharan
@copyconstruct
- Many “anti-DEI” legal immigrants who celebrated Trump are now realizing that “America first” is fundamentally incompatible with their dreams of “global meritocracy”. And that Trump’s core base is comprised of people who find their presence in America to be rather undesirable.
- From personal experience, I know how hard and frustrating it can be to be an Indian immigrant stuck in a never ending green card queue, but I doubt acting entitled, or worse, *disparaging* other nationalities as less deserving serves the cause very well. Let’s not be jerks.
- The detailed AWS incident report is out, and it’s worth a read - DNS records managed by 2 systems; a race condition led to regional record getting unset - EC2 lease establishment was borked as it depends on DynamoDB - fluctuating NLB health checks leading to EC2 DNS entry purges
- Ok, Elon going thermonuclear on nativists and racists, defending the H-1B visa to *this*,degree wasn’t on my bingo card. A very pleasant surprise, but given the amount of vitriol and hatred thats been aimed at immigrant tech workers, this is extremely welcome.
- Microservices or not, one of the best things you can do to improve your own productivity is to have a fast, local development environment setup with minimum dependencies and ways to introspect isolated parts of your codebase.
- Thinking of the time Elon publicly fired an Android engineer for saying that the app was slow because of technical debt and a full rewrite is needed to address perf problems. 3 months on, Elon himself proposes a full rewrite himself, because a config change caused an outage. 😅
- - Microservices are hard. - Building reliable and testable microservices is a lot harder than most folks think - Effectively *testing* microservices requires a ton of tooling and foresight. - A Netflix/Uber style microservices isn't required by many (most?) orgs. - Macroservices?
- Full report for yesterday’s Google outage - not feature flagging a new code path - null pointer crashing a binary when reading empty fields from Spanner - remediation causing a thundering herd as there was no exponential backoff - which required manual throttling to recover from
- The most ill-conceived idea that seems to have ossified among certain group of people is that Twitter was failing because the engineering culture wasn’t high-performing enough The problem with Twitter was product and leadership, and not engineering not executing well enough.
- Dropbox famously built their own data centres and moved off of S3 to reduce costs, and now moved *back* to AWS (DynamoDB, S3) again to save costs for their metadata storage, because it turned out scaling MySQL was hard for this use case.
- Tech Debt is one of those things that make sense to engineering, but to leadership it sounds like “we’ve created a mess over the years that slowed the product, we did nothing to fix it, and now we need to spend *even more* time and people on fixing it”. Not a winning argument.
- The hill I will die on: technical debt is an engineering problem and is owned by engineering, not “product” and not your C-suite. By engineering I mean the engineering org and those at the higher echelons, not the junior-ish engineers who are the leaf nodes in the org chart.
- This was the woman who posted a picture of herself sleeping in the office to meet Elon’s deadlines. At the time, a lot of prominent people lauded this, saying “this is how the most impressive software is built”. Fast forward a couple of months and she’s fired.
Just got confirmation that Esther Crawford, chief executive of Twitter Payments, is out.
