Kelsey Hightower
@kelseyhightower
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Minimalist DMs are now closed. Just email me: kelsey.hightower @gmail .com
Joined June 2010
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Pinned Tweet
It's hard to learn anything when you think you have all the answers.
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Today I'm announcing my retirement from Google. Even the best rides come to an end. As I turn the page on this chapter, I realized I've spent the last 25 years learning how to work, I hope to spend the rest of my life learning how to live.
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I don't talk about job promotions very often, but this one deserves a little celebration. I just made L9 as an individual contributor on Google's engineering ladder, which means I've earned the privilege of referring to my role as "Distinguished" on all my slide decks.
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A career in tech is less about learning a specific tool as it is the willingness to learn a different tool when the time comes.
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The Amazon Prime Video team was able to reduce cost by moving from Serverless backed by Lambda to monoliths running on VMs.
"Moving our service to a monolith reduced our infrastructure cost by over 90%. It also increased our scaling capabilities."
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Developers should be as afraid of GitHub Copilot as mathematicians are of calculators.
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The best programming language is the one you know how to use.
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This is embarrassing. A debate on vim vs emacs would be more productive.
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So you want to roll your own application platform. All you need is:
Linux
Docker
Kubernetes
Istio
Prometheus
Fluentd
Grafana
Jaeger
Harbor
Open Policy Agent
Vault
Spinnaker and Jenkins
Oh, almost forgot, you're also going to need servers, people, and glue. Bring lots of glue.
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Where are the low level system engineers? Specifically the people writing C or C++ hacking on kernels, device drivers, and file systems.
Code schools don't seem to be teaching this stuff and some universities have moved up the stack.
Are we even training the next generation?
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Back in my day, we didn't need CI/CD, we had FTP. Real developers made changes in production.
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Overly focusing on tech is how you end up with the skills of a senior engineer and the experience of a junior human being.
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If I can create an account online, pay for it online, I should be able to cancel it online. 🤬
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By 2025 it will take 64 CPUs and 1TB RAM to deploy a modern "Hello, World!" application.
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Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source. "public money, public code"
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I never fully understood how far I've come until I read someone else tell my story.
"From McDonald's to Google: How Kelsey Hightower became one of the most respected people in cloud computing" by
@tomkrazit
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2020 prediction: Monolithic applications will be back in style after people discover the drawbacks of distributed monolithic applications.
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You haven't mastered a tool until you understand when it should not be used.
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Once you've found success, your next goal should be helping others do the same.
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I was 32 years old when I started learning Kubernetes. It's never too late to get started because you'll be learning for the rest of your life.
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To my fellow technologist hoping to change the world, you must care for the people who live in it; and those who had that right taken away.
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No Stack Developer
A no stack developer criticizes the stack without understanding the stack. In addition to complaining, no stack developers engage in full rewrites, but don't finish them before quitting or getting fired, leaving an organization with no stack.
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If Apple follows suit on this whole AI-computer trend, then I'm most likely going back to Linux on the desktop. ML as a tool is fine, but this attempt to infuse AI into everything is giving me "smart" vibes all over again.
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Good developers copy; great developers paste.
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I've always claimed to be self taught, but after some reflection, I've come to realize the authors of all those books, blog posts, docs, and open source projects were my teachers.
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Most of what we call "tech" is about getting the right information into a database and trying to prevent the wrong person from reading or updating it.
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Cryptocurrency is gaslighting the entire tech industry.
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Today I'm reminded that programming is still too hard. If you don't believe me try teaching someone with little to no experience writing software.
Just getting a development environment setup can be overwhelming, and without some serious motivation, this is where people give up.
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Maintaining an open-source project is like being a Flight Attendant for an airline where all tickets are free and the majority of customer surveys offer suggestions on how to fly the airplane.
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What skills should I invest in?
People skills.
No. I mean what tools and best practices should I learn?
Learn what respect is. Then use it on everyone around you.
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I wish more misunderstandings were resolved like this.
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If something is too early to criticize it's also too early to evangelize.
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My heart goes out to everyone looking for a job right now and struggling to find something. When I was coming up in the early 2000s, in Atlanta, I only had to apply to like 2 or 3 jobs a week, and even with a basic skillset interviews quickly followed.
This job market is totally
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Stacey Abrams lost an election, and instead of burning the house down, she helped build a better one. That's leadership.
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Health insurance being tied to your employer is insane.
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I proposed to my wife with a cubic zirconia ring. I used the money I saved not buying a diamond to pay off her debt. We've been married and debt free for 16 years.
Cubic zirconias are forever.
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My daughter is taking AP computer science in high school and suddenly I'm a big Java fan as that's the language used in the course.
She's using IntelliJ to complete assignments and I just can't stop smiling. I'm having one of those proud dad moments.
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My Lyft driver told me about his dream of building voice applications for the elderly, and improving the lives of others. I had an extra Google Home Mini on me, so I gave it to him, and told him: “get started”.
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Sorry for all the human focused tweets lately. Don't worry, I got you.
Kubernetes. Something. Something. Kubernetes.
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The cloud is just someone else's computer, power, cooling system, underwater sea cables, networking equipment, data center and the land it sits on, insurance policies, roadmaps, and a whole lot of people to build, secure, monitor, and support all of the software that runs on top.
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🤯
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When I talk about sharing Earth's resources people call me a socialist. When I talk about Kubernetes and sharing compute resources I'm called a thought leader.
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The OS abstracts away the machine while leaking hardware faults. Docker abstracts away the OS while leaking software faults. Kubernetes abstracts away multiple machines while leaking the distributed system faults.
We are the plumbers.
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Docker != Containers
There are container images. Docker can build them. There are container registries. Docker can push and pull from them. There are container runtimes. Docker is one of them. There are container processes. Docker can create them but Linux is still the boss.
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If you're stuck on-prem, and starting to feel like you missed out on the cloud native movement, just start calling it "edge" and consider your digital transformation complete.
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You can stand with Ukraine and against racism; at the same time.
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Stick to boring architecture for as long as possible, and spend the majority of your time, and resources, building something your customers are willing to pay for.
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Imagine if we put the same effort into supporting dark people as we put into supporting dark mode.
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Oracle spelled backwards is El Caro, which means expensive in Spanish.
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I want to build a FinTech company that keeps people out of debt. It'll be backed by an ML engine called common sense.
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Upper management making all the technology decisions is like your parents buying your school clothes... without you.
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I got a spot bonus at work today and it made me tear up a bit.
I was rewarded for continuously helping others. It's the kind of work that doesn't show up on performance review packets, but it feels good to know it still counts.
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I retired last year. At some point enough is enough.
Think of it this way. What's your number? Mine was based on the ability to live off 3% interest, think US treasury bonds, without touching the principal, and continuing to save.
$200K/year and you don't have to work
or
$700K/year and you work 50 hrs a week, 3 weeks vacation/year
which are you picking and why?
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Git has the best proof of work implementation in the world. Each commit literally represents your work.
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Hire the right people but not before you fire the wrong people.
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With generative AI on the horizon there has never been a better time to learn the fundamentals.
The amount of garbage that is about to be generated, checked in, and deployed is going to increase the value of those that actually understand how things work.
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Introducing the no code framework: write nothing; deploy nowhere.
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I'm about to go on a long vacation, and after 20 years in tech, and being a workaholic in denial, this is one of the most challenging things I've ever done.
Turning down internal work opportunities is much harder than I thought and the fear of becoming irrelevant is real.
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The thing you're trying to build should be more exciting than the tools used to build it.
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Introducing Service Weaver: A new open source framework for writing backend applications.
And the dope part, Service Weaver allows you to write applications as a modular monolith, and deploy it as a set of microservices using custom deployers. 🤯
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@codeFreedomRitr
Senior engineers can learn to share the credit. Find co-founders for their best ideas. Example: Pull in mid-level and junior engineers into the planning phase of a project such as design sessions with product teams so they can earn credit for strategic work vs being handed todo
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Google Summer of Code will be opening up to all newcomers of open source that are 18 years and older, and will no longer be solely focused on university students or recent graduates.
This is a welcomed change for self-taught developers like myself.
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I didn't respond to your DM because I'm still waiting for what comes after "Hi".
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Criticism is easy. Creating something worth criticizing is the hard part.
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It's ok to be proud of yourself. Life is hard; celebrate everything.
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Describe software engineering in three words or less.
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Towards Modern Development of Cloud Applications
"microservices conflate logical boundaries (how code is written) with physical boundaries (how code is deployed)."
"we propose a different programming methodology"
"Our implementation reduces application latency by up to 15x and
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Remember the LAMP stack? Life was so much simpler back then, it was all most people needed, and I bet the same is true today.
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A new revision of Fortran, Fortran 2023, is about to drop and it includes an HTTP client. 🤯
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In essence, Kubernetes is the sum of all the bash scripts and best practices that most system administrators would cobble together over time, presented as a single system behind a declarative set of APIs.
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Rolling your own platform has never been easier. All you gotta do is pick 200 items from this list and you're good to go.
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An eleven year old reminded me the future is as bright as we want it to be. She’s working on an operating system and ramping up on this Kubernetes thing she keeps hearing about.
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One of the most powerful arguments against private prisons: "When you start a business you start looking for customers".
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Team JavaScript. Why didn't you tell me there are three ways of doing everything and none of them are recommended?
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This idea that you have to be an expert before you can share your thoughts or opinions is a tool gatekeepers use to discourage people from looking behind the curtains.
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If you are a developer looking to change the world, consider writing docs, with full code examples, not snippets, for all your projects.
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Screwdrivers are going to make hammers obsolete. Silly right? That's what most tech discussions turn into.
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I'll never understand mounting a TV over a fireplace.
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Microservices vs monoliths doesn't matter. Write modular code, abstract away services into reusable components, and combine them into one or more artifacts based on your needs.
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The Go programming language is at the foundation of some amazing open source projects. Just to name a few:
Terraform
Docker
Kubernetes
Etcd
Prometheus
CockroachDB
NATS
Vault
Caddy
Open Policy Agent
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Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is the SELinux of the Web. You really want to do the right thing but it only works when you:
"Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*"
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I remember the days when I built my own gaming PCs. Eventually I sold out and bought a Xbox because I just wanted to play games, not build gaming rigs.
Serverless is like that.
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It's been 20 minutes and I'm still laughing. I just can't.
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What if technical interviews were a two way street? The candidate would get to ask a question for every question asked of them. Interviewers get the same amount of prep material as the candidate.
This would level the playing field and bring a touch of humility to the process.
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Web3 isn't a tech stack. Web3 is a business model.
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Coding is an activity. Solving problems is an outcome. You can solve a lot of problems without writing a single line of code.
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I really appreciate API docs with curl examples.
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The idea that people have to get in early on some new technology or they are going to be left behind forever is insane. Half the stuff you're using right now was invented before you were born.
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The new site is extra dope.
Now when you visit the site, you'll be presented with a lightweight version of VS Code running fully in the browser. Open a folder on your local machine and start coding.
No install required.🤯
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Racism is an infectious disease underlying the longest running pandemic in human history.
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Too many people covering Ukraine are more concerned about the economy and asset prices than the lives of the humans that will be impacted most.
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I want my software to run locally, next to my data, on my machine, without all the "send me your data for features" stuff.
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