The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

So many gems in here but this one about microservices is my favorite:

grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too

I keep trying to explain this to tiny dev teams (1-2 people) that will cheerfully take a trivial web app with maybe five forms and split it up into “microservices” that share a database, an API Management layer, a queue for batch jobs to process “huge” volumes (megabytes) of data, an email notification system, an observablity platform (bespoke!) and then… and then… turn the trivial web forms into a SPA app because “that’s easier”.

Now I understand that “architecture” and “patterns” is a jobs program for useless developers. It’s this, or they’d be on the streets holding a sign saying “will write JavaScript for a sandwich”.

>I keep trying to explain this to tiny dev teams

I'm curious what role you have where you're doing this repeatedly

The customer is a government department formed by the merger of a bunch of only vaguely related agencies. They have “inherited” dozens of developers from these mergers, maybe over a hundred if you count the random foreign outsourcers. As you can imagine there’s no consistency or organisational structure because it wasn’t built up as a cohesive team from the beginning.

The agencies are similarly uncoordinated and will pick up their metaphorical credit card and just throw it at random small dev teams, internally, external, or a mix.

Those people will happily take the credit! The money just… disappears. It’s like a magic trick, or one of those street urchins that rips you off when you’re on holiday in some backwards part of the world like Paris.

I get brought in as “the cloud consultant” for a week or two at the end to deploy the latest ball of mud with live wires sticking out of it to production.

This invariably becomes an argument because the ball of mud the street urchins have sold to the customer is not fit for… anything… certainly not for handling PII or money, but they spent the budget and the status reports were all green ticks for years.

Fundamentally, the issue is that they're "going into the cloud" with platform as a service, IaC, and everything, but at some level they don't fully grok what that means and the type of oversight required to make that work at a reasonable cost.

"But the nice sales person from Microsoft assured me the cloud is cheaper!"

Is this DCS in NSW? If so that would explain so much about my own work interactions with them.