validated

Random notes for January 2023

Gregory Golberg holding forth, self-promotion , , , , , , , , , , ,

Not enough for any singular entry, but enough to write a bunch of annoyed points. Because I hate Twitter threads and this is the reverse: unconnected entries jammed together.

  • GoLang: Looks like the answers to my questions are nicely written up here.
  • Technology and Society: Ok, I promise I’ll get to geekery here. So, PeopleCDC folks seem upset about the New Yorker article. But now, I am surprised — and maybe it is an oversight — at the lack of inclusion of IT people in the form. Artists, yeah, to carry the message — but if the goal is to slow the spread, why no consideration given to automation of various things (look at how pathetic most government websites are for things that are routine).

    Not expecting to hear back, really.
  • Google Ads and API Management: Every time you think you get used to all the various entities in Google Ads, you realize there’s of course a sunsetting of UA … Of course! Of course this is where I pause and let Steve Yegge on with his rant:

    Dear RECIPIENT,

    Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem.

    We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year.

  • API Management, ListHub: First, I learned there’s a standards body Unsure what I’m making of it (I mean, I suppose I’ve gotten good results from IAB, and standardization of FinOps is somewhat ongoing, so, er, maybe not all bureaucracy is an awful horrible crap.

    But that’s kind of a side note.

Patterns: descriptivism vs prescriptivism

Gregory Golberg holding forth , , , ,

This is going to be so short, it requires this sentence to say so so it appears a bit longer.

It seems that there are two ways of looking at them. Prescriptive: “When faced with a problem of class X, use pattern A”. Or descriptive, “When faced with a problem of class X, a lot of times engineers use approaches Alpha, Beta, Gamma that have a particular pattern in common; let’s extract it and call it A so we have a common terminology.”

The “prescriptive” part really should be a “strong suggestion” added weight to by the fact that it is widespread enough to get a name, but nothing beyond that. (See also “Thinking outside the box“).

What prompted this? Well, TIL that exercises such as Ad hoc querying on AWS have a name: “lakehouse“, and that I’ve apparently been thinking about how best to do “Reverse ETL” without thinking “Reverse ETL”. Well, I guess that’s open source marketing.

This post is not making any prescriptions.