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Will Gallego

@gallego.bsky.social

willgallego.com

759 Posts443 Follower167 Folgt
Will Gallego@gallego.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Oh hey *tap tap* this still on? Yeah, I'm not on Bluesky (any social media) much lately because, well, you can imagine. But there's lots of you out there who are wonderful people that I don't get to talk to otherwise. So just popping in to say hi! I hope you're taking care of yourselves.

Kelsey Hightower@kelseyhightower.com · 6mo ago

I'm still writing code the hard way. I'm slow. I like to think critically about every line of code and fiddle with variable names until everything looks right. I treat code as a liability and try to ship only what's necessary. It's hard to imagine writing code any other way.

JetBrains GoLand IDE showing sqlite3 bindings written in Go.
Fred Hebert@ferd.ca · 8mo ago

An incident is an opportunity to learn and reorient how you navigate a tradeoff space, and the desire to wall them off as a disjoint/irrelevant side-effect of development you shouldn't spend time thinking about can do major disservices to organizations. But is desirable for entrenched structures.

Ruth Malan@ruthmalan.bsky.social · 8mo ago

We’re discussing this classic today. The #PapersInSystems community is a lovely community to have a focused conversation with — the discussions draw on so much experience, and draw in connections to other work.

Ruth Malan@ruthmalan.bsky.social · 9mo ago

The next #PapersInSystems discussion is Monday Dec 1, 1-2pm Eastern, Josh Reynolds will lead, and the paper is "The Architecture of Complexity" by Herbert Simon. More info/sign up (free of course): ti.to/bredemeyer/a...

Some quotes to tease the appetite for reading this 1962 paper: "Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial." "In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole. In the face of complexity, an in-principle reductionist may be at the same time a pragmatic holist." "Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms. We detect the organelles in a cell in the way we detect the raisins in a cake — they are “visibly” differentiated substructures localized spatially in the larger structure. On the other hand, we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom. These two points of view can be reconciled by defining hierarchy in terms of intensity of interaction, but observing that in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity.”
Will Gallego@gallego.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Give me the assignment and I don't miss. Clockwise from top right: - Caramel apple pie - Two pumpkin pies - Two banana cream pies - Blueberry pie - A Milk Bar inspired pie in the middle

Seven different pies spread across a table in a flower pattern. Two pumpkin, two banana cream, a Milk Bar inspired pie, an apple, and a blueberry Flower shape.
Fred Hebert@ferd.ca · 9mo ago

Seeing more reports and industry players blaming code reviews for slowing down the quick development done with AI. It's unclear whether anyone's asking if this is just moving the cognitive bottleneck of "understanding what's happening" around. "Add AI to the reviews" seems to be the end goal here.

Will Gallego@gallego.bsky.social · 9mo ago

I keep hearing "Well, you can't put the genie back in the bottle..." wrt AI from the same people who are promoting it so hard. If it's so great, why would you *want* to? Isn't that an aphorism for something destructive, or at least negatively impactful? Also, I just don't agree with the premise.

Will Gallego@gallego.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Don't worry, as a resident of NYC suburbs we're not putting up with the bullshit from people who threaten to leave with Mamdani's win either. Congrats New York, wish I was still living there to celebrate.

Will Gallego@gallego.bsky.social · 10mo ago

The whole "Should millionaires be subsidized to ride the bus/have free child care?" debate is so wildly ridiculous. If public schools didn't exist, the same argument would be used there. "Why should the rich get free education!?"

Elle@elleisanisland.bsky.social · 10mo ago

I'm not sure you can get more marie antoinette than taking away food stamps before thanksgiving while you build a gold and marble dance hall so the other crooks can bring bribe you over a badly-cooked (argentinian) steak

Sarah Butt@sarahbutt.bsky.social · 10mo ago

The number of people who didn’t know what us-east-1 was on Sunday and are suddenly experts in running multi-region distributed systems at scale today is truly remarkable.

Will Gallego@gallego.bsky.social · 10mo ago

At Etsy, we had an upgrade go out for MySQL with Chef. Meant to go to one server, instead upgraded all of production. During that time, it had to update very tall tables, which mean locking them from any reads or writes. Turned into a multi-hour downtime where we just had to wait for it to finish.

Hazel Weakly@hazelweakly.me · 10mo ago

#hugOps story time! Quote this and tell me the biggest incident you ever saw in production. It’s inevitable, it’s gonna happen, and learning from incidents is way better than shitting on people trying to fix them. I’ll start :) hazelweakly.me/blog/mother-...