The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

I have a conspiracy theory that it’s a pattern pushed by cloud to get people to build applications that:

- Cannot be run without an orchestrator like K8S, which is a bear to install and maintain, which helps sell managed cloud.

- Uses more network bandwidth, which they bill for, and CPU, which they bill for.

- Makes it hard to share and maintain complex or large state within the application, encouraging the use of more managed database and event queue services as a substitute, which they bill for. (Example: a monolith can use a queue or a channel, while for microservices you’re going to want Kafka or some other beast.)

- Can’t be run locally easily, meaning you need dev environments in cloud, which means more cloud costs. You might even need multiple dev and test environments. That’s even more cloud cost.

- Tends to become dependent on the peculiarities of a given cloud host, such as how they do networking, increasing cloud lock in.

Anyone else remember how cloud was pitched as saving money on IT? That was hilarious. Knew it was BS way back in the 2000s and that it would eventually end up making everything cost more.

Those are all good points, but missing the most important one, the "Gospel of Scalability". Every other startup wants to be the next Google and therefore thinks they need to design service boundaries that can scale infinitely...

It's 100% this; you're right on the money (pun intended).

Don't forget various pipelines, IaC, pipelines for deploying IaC, test/dev/staging/whatever environments, organization permissions strategies etc etc...

When I worked at a large, uh, cloud company as a consultant, solutions were often tailored towards "best practices"--this meant, in reality, large complex serverless/containerized things with all sorts of integrations for monitoring, logging, NoSQL, queues etc, often for dinky little things that an RPI running RoR or NodeJS could serve without breaking a sweat.

With rare exceptions, we'd never be able to say, deploy a simple go server on a VM with server-side rendered templates behind a load balancer with some auto-scaling and a managed database. Far too pedestrian.

Sure, it's "best practices" for "high-availability" but was almost always overkill and a nightmare to troubleshoot.

There is now an entire generation of developers steeped in SaaS who literally don’t know how to do anything else, and have this insanely distorted picture of how much power is needed to do simple things.

It’s hard to hire people to do anything else. People don’t know how to admin machines so forget bare metal even though it can be thousands of times cheaper for some work loads (especially bandwidth).

You’re not exaggerating with a raspberry pi. Not at all.

Thanks for making me feel less alone in this perspective--it's always been kind of verboten to say such a thing in those kinds of workplaces, but all my software type friends agree completely.

The "entire generation of developers" paradigm is all over in different domains too--web programmers that seem to honestly think web development is only React/Angular and seem to have no idea that you can just write JS, python programmers that have no idea a large portion of the "performant codebases" are piles of native dependencies etc

One way of looking at it is that there are about the same number of programmers today with a deep understanding of the machine as there were in the 90s. There are just 3-4X more programmers who are just after a career and learn only the skills necessary and follow what seem to be the most employable trends.

Same goes for users. There are about the same number of computer literate users as there were back then. There’s just a new class of iPad/iPhone user who is only a casual user of computers and the net and barely knows what a file is.