Costs exposed: Frameworks
“Fast machines, slow machines”… ah, the post that spawned these series. As I frantically typed that article while replying to angry tweets, the thought came to mind: software engineering as a whole is hyper-focused on lowering the costs to write new code, yet there is a disregard for the costs that these improvements bring to other disciplines in a company on even to end users. So, in this series finale, I want to compare how some choices that apparently lower development costs actually increase costs elsewhere. I also want to highlight how, if we made different decisions during development, we could possibly expose those extra costs early on. This is beneficial because exposing costs upfront allows us to make tough choices when there is still a chance of changing course. To make things specific, I will look at how the use of modern frameworks that facilitate development can end up hurting performance, reliability, and usability. So let’s start with a three-part rant first (sorry) and then let’s look at what we might do.
August 31, 2023
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Tags:
opinion, programming, sre
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7 minutes)
Costs exposed: On-call ticket handling
In the previous post, I proposed that certain engineering practices expose systemic costs and help with planning while other practices hide those same costs and disturb ongoing plans. The idea I’m trying to convey is hard to communicate in the abstract so, in that post, I used the differences between a monorepo and a multirepo setup as an example. Today, I’ll expore a different scenario to support the same idea. I’m going to talk about how certain ticket assignment practices during on-call operations can expose service support costs vs. how other practices hide them. Keep in mind that, just like in the previous post, I do not want to compare the general merits of one approach vs. the other. The only thing I want to compare is whether one approach centralizes toil and allows management to quantify its cost vs. how another approach hides toil by smearing it over the whole team in hard-to-quantify ways. Whether management actually does something to correct the situation once the costs are exposed is a different story.
August 26, 2023
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Tags:
opinion, programming, sre
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7 minutes)
Costs exposed: Monorepo vs. multirepo
In software engineering organizations, there are certain practices that keep costs under control even if those seem more expensive at first. Unfortunately, because such practices feel more expensive, teams choose to keep their status quo even when they know it is suboptimal. This choice ends up hurting productivity and morale because planned work is continuously interrupted, which in turn drags project completion. The reason I say seem and not are is because the alternatives to these cost-exposing practices also suffer from costs. The difference is that, while the former surface costs, leading to the need to allocate time and people to infrastructure work, the latter keeps the costs smeared over teams and individuals in ways that are difficult to account and plan for. To illustrate what I’m trying to say, I’ll present three different scenarios in which this opinion applies. All of these case studies come from past personal experiences while working in different teams and projects. The first one covered in this post is about the adoption of a monorepo vs. the use of multiple different repositories. The other two will come in follow-up articles.
August 23, 2023
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Tags:
monorepo, opinion, programming
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6 minutes)
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