CEO of the System Initiative, Co-Founder of Chef. Sustainable free and open source software communities. Music. He/Him. Mastodon:
@adamhjk
@hachyderm
.io,
Two racks. My friends, it fits in *two racks*. I love the cloud as much as the next person, but $7m over five years to run a workload that will fit in *two racks* makes me want to sleep for a year. Fully automating two racks was not hard.
Lots of folks predicting that 37signals will return to the cloud after realizing how "hard" it is to run datacenters and computers. My friends, I am old. I have built datacenters by hand. I have automated things in every generation of the internet. I assure you, it is not harder
if you’re a leader, and you aren’t analyzing how you would act, and why, in the situation at basecamp, you’re missing a golden opportunity. Every step offers a gold mine of introspection.
If you were comfortable with GitHub pre acquisition, but you are uncomfortable with Microsoft - I think you should’ve paid more attention to GitHubs own struggles, and Microsoft’s transformation. I’m *more* ok with Microsoft, not less.
The worst outcome for Redis labs. Congratulations! You now have a competitor that’s well funded, ships a trustable product at $0, and will obviously be what cloud providers use to compete. That software will start to gain momentum, and your defacto standard will falter.
Backlogs and Sprints are the two worst things that we were gifted by Scrum. The backlog allows you to "plan" in advance - the idea being that you know what to build, and it's just a matter of building it. You get folks to estimate it, so you can have a sense of how long it takes
One other observation - sometimes the job of a leader is to shut the fuck up and eat it. It doesn’t always matter what you think. Why run off about escalating? Why not just recognize that the list caused problems, acknowledge it, acknowledge the obvious complicity, and move on?
So are we admitting that Service Oriented Architecture was always what we wanted, and microservices was a weird over-correction for both lack of discipline and horrific developer->production pipeline design? Or too soon?
So happy that
@chef
is now a 100% open source company. They are done being open core, and I have to say, I'm stoked about it. It aligns the company with its core values in a way that is so much more elegant and understandable.
Honestly, the best argument for keeping your static, predictable workload in the cloud rather than a data center is simply that we, as an industry, have pretty much forgotten how to do it any other way.
I'm not saying the cloud didn't make things that were legitimately difficult easier. Or didn't solve real pain points. It did and it does. But when you're looking at two datacenters and four racks total? You could do it all literally by hand and not suffer too badly.
Thoughts on
@oxidecomputer
. First - this is what venture capital is for. It’s a big bet on an expert team looking to dramatically alter a market. Love it. 1/n
I want to dig in on why Red Hat is better at generating revenue from open source than anyone who has ever done it. This is a perfect example. Do you know how rare it is to generate $1B/ARR? Hashicorp is *half* that number. Let that sink in.
to use managed services to rack, wire, and boot servers. It *is* harder to do it on demand. But the idea that they're going to come running back to the cloud because cost makes them? You're just wrong. You either don't remember or never knew what it was actually like.
Okay twitter friends. If your hot take is “those dummies don’t know to not have more than $250k in a bank account”, you’ve got homework to do about how fdic insurance works. Imagine you have $15m in cash for your startup. Go figure out how to stay under the limit.
Those of us who remember when open source was the novel underdog, allowing us to learn, grow, and build things our proprietary peers could not - we tend to see the relationship to corp $ in OSS as a net benefit, pretty much always.
If you think Bitcoin is for the little guys - check out the grift Elon musk just pulled off in plain view. He gives a fuck about the environmental impact - he cares about the stock taking a hit when index funds rebalance. And he unwound that Bitcoin position first.
One of the killer parts of Rust for building web APIs is Serde. No language I’ve ever used is better at serializing to and from types, with full control over every aspect. It’s glorious. dtolnay is truly in a different league when it comes to macros.
Today we've open sourced the System Initiative software! . I'm so proud of the team, and can't wait to build with all of you. You can see the code at , and learn more about our approach to open source at :)
The System Initiative software is now open source and in open beta! Learn more at , read
@adamjk
’s blog post at , and see the source code at . Join us in rebuilding DevOps from the ground up!
I’m immensely proud of
@chef
, the people who make it, and who use it. You’ve all touched my life in ways I can’t describe. I’m happy to see it find a good home with Progress.
Today I learned that the way to turn an array of strings into a single string separated by spaces in Python is " ".join(your_array) - and my friends, I get that you think its fun to have one way to do it, but that is an *insane* way to do it.
It makes complete sense to me that these numbers pencil out like this. In many ways, we’re paying for having forgotten how to rack compute, manage operating systems, and run networks.
I feel like GitHub actions showed real promise to grow into something spectacular. Instead it’s kind of languished. Watching the SI team convert to buildkite, and it’s shocking how much better it is.
Twitter engineering friends, for a fully remote company, would you rather: a) loaded MacBook Pro, b) 32 core/64 thread threadripper workstation running Linux and a smaller Mac laptop for travel if you need it?
My friends - there is much lovely pragmatism and functionality in this blog post about how slack uses terraform. And also, it absolutely inspires me to start the conversation about how we can do better.
The answer is because some times it’s easy to forget that being the leader (sometimes) means suffering for the good of the organization. Basecamp has always been clear that it’s about the founders happiness.
It's all happening, friends. That's an early build of System Initiative from within System Initiative. That's screenshot is the moral equivalent of your entire production IaC repository. We're almost ready for other people to use it for real.
Okay, lets talk nerdy. One of most fundamental underpinnings of the way we think about doing infrastructure automation is the idea that it's best done in a declarative way. Having a declaration of intent, followed by an idempotent, convergent control loop.
I like to believe I would’ve killed the names list the moment I saw it. In 2009 it wouldn’t have been because I thought it was racist (tho I see that it is now), but because you cannot have disdain for the people you serve.
Okay, since
@sogrady
is a pal, here are my thoughts on IBM buying Hashicorp. First - congratulations to all my Hashicorp people - it's an incredible accomplishment to have built a company like that, and a crazy thing to have someone value what you built at $4B+. Congratulations.
We need Sustainable Free and Open Source Communities. Rather than fretting about business models, and trying to protect revenue at the expense of users freedom, we need to collaborate on the future of our communities social contracts. Starting today:
My friends, this is crazy talk. Say hello. Be inefficient. Be authentic. Talk to each other. Make jokes! Stray off topic. Have fun! Fun teams ship more.
Had a couple of conversations in the last few days that make it time to say again: there is only one effective business model. It is "if you want something from me, you pay me for it". That's it. That's the model.
The story that says this isn’t real cost savings hinges on how hard it will be in comparison to manage these workloads. Let me say, if you believe there is $7m in mgmt spend over 5 years for two racks of computers: you’re wrong.
My day was full, and I’ll read the S-1 in full, but let’s take a moment and give it up to Hashicorp.
@mitchellh
and
@armon
have built an incredible company. They hired amazing people, made it a great place for them to work, and built technology that improved the industry.
Oookay, I gotta stop talking about this. We've reached the part of the story where people who should know better are straight faced saying Oracle is a better friend to open source than Red Hat because they wrote a blog post punching their competitor. Y'all need to do better.
If you’ve got a workload that benefits from immediate scaling, following by descaling, it makes sense cloud saves you money. But if you can plot your growth and key scaling metrics in excel and they reliably wind up within an order of magnitude, there’s $ to save.
Lots of San Francisco hate lately. We moved here six years ago. We’ve made friends, have great neighbors, live in a vibrant and diverse neighborhood. My daughter goes to a great public school. We aren’t leaving, probably ever. Here’s some tips.
But if you know it’s bad, and I know it’s bad, and we’re dropping the bad thing, that’s it for leadership. You *never* get to kick that shit down, or ask your employees to eat it for your comfort. Your job is to sit in the discomfort, and lead your people through their grief.
The more I think about it, the more GitHub pivoting to be an AI centered experience is going to create a market opportunity for a new competitor. There is a lot left undone that this direction just will not only not address, but makes arguing to address it misaligned.
A confession. I’m very proud of my
#OSCON
keynote - but I still struggle to replace “guys” from my vocabulary. If you saw/heard that and it made you uncomfortable, I am sorry. I’ll do better. A thank you to
@bridgetkromhout
who pointed this out to me, in rehearsal and in person
The developer experience of having your work locally is better. Plenty of power to go around. The idea of cloud based developer tooling making sense because of power was always pretty dubious. Reproducability? On-boarding? Good reasons! But that's about it.
Let's say nice things about technology today. I'll start. If it wasn't for
@lkanies
and
@puppetize
, there is no way we would have been able to adapt as an industry to the rise of the cloud. Quote tweet me with your own.
Fuck yeah,
@mitchellh
and
@armon
and everyone who has been a part of the Hashicorp journey. What brought you here was amazing work - you built a stellar team, great technology, fabulous products, and a lasting company with a huge impact. Stoked for all of you. Congratulations!
Would it be interesting to do a podcast where we interview the authors of great software about how it was built? Like a software architecture version of song exploder.
So I’m not misunderstood - “drop the toxic thing” - means acknowledging its toxicity, acknowledging your role in it, addressing what will happen next, following through consistently, and allowing people to vent and grieve. Except the leaders: they need to grieve in private!
Half way to my goal (to run from my house to the ocean and back) - ran my first 10K. 1:01:58, with stood for traffic! I beat 10 minutes a mile (just barely). Yay!
So take it from me and from DHH - if you’re in leadership, and shits toxic, you have to drop the toxic thing, and then make space for people to heal - which probably means suffering yourself in private a little. It’s a small price to pay.
My friends, I’m not some kind of zealous cloud repatriation fanatic. I’m happily building and using the cloud. I suspect you should too. But I’m also not pretending that if I wind up with a static, predictable workload, I couldn’t run that (probably dramatically) cheaper in a DC
It’s not open source, because you want no competition. You want the benefits to accrue to you. That’s not wrong in some absolute sense. But no, you can’t call it open source. You dislike source available because the open source brand delivers actual trust.
I'm really struggling with wording here. We released GB under the FSL (
@getsentry
's new non-compete MIT converting license) which is technically not "OSS" as defined by the OSI, but "source available" seems misleading in a different way.
What do you all think?
The FSL
If you've been following along, here is the official response from OpenTofu: - the analysis they attach is dramatically more thorough than any I've seen so far.
I hope someday every entrepreneur gets to feel what I do today. So much kindness and love. I heard from every competitor we’ve had over the years. It’s very nice.
I want to give the opposite advice. If the way to provide a great experience is to build a database that meets your needs: make a database. Make a distributed wire protocol. Make whatever you need to make for your art to be expressed.
That's it. That's the talk.
"Never write a database. Even if you want to, even if you think you should. Resist. Never write a database. Unless you have to write a database. But you don't."
I will present this talk at any conference of your choosing.
I’m starting to think that a lot of our foundational metaphors for how to build startups and companies is off, in ways that dramatically influence our behavior. For example, that software engineering and product development is like a factory.
The best skill you can give yourself as an engineer: the patience and skill of reading other peoples source code for understanding and context. We tend to give up, and declare code "over-engineered", when what we mean is it's easier to build your model from scratch than dig deep.
By writing that reply to the employee, he prolonged the suffering. To no fruitful end! The list was going to be gone either way! All he had to do in that moment was not care about being right, and not need to be understood. He just needed to do the right thing in the moment.
Friends, I did read the same doc you did re: nohello. It's not that I didn't understand it. It's that it shouldn't be anyones job to police how other folks communicate. If someone says "hey", just say "hey, whats up" like a human being. Don't link them to a fucking doc.
It’s what they want, the way they want it. He didn’t need to poke that employee in the eye. He just needed to shut up, close a door, and talk to a therapist about his feelings. So everyone could heal.
Just want to put in your ear that according to the latest DORA report, only 18% of respondents can do what Flickr was doing in 2009: deploy 10 times a day. I know we'll quibble on it being a good metric. But we've been steadily moving the goal posts backwards from the jump.
Another bit of perspective re: Copilot. This one people will probably like less, but lets do it anyway. Here is what it is like, from my experience, to be having conversations about legal issues and open source when you are an executive. I have no insight or connection to GitHub.
We didn't use IaC to get rid of ClickOps. We used IaC to get repeatability, policy enforcement, and scale - at the expense of the user experience in ClickOps. It was a good bet, and it's remarkable how well it worked out. But it's not the only bet we could have made!
Open source isn’t a business model. But if we want startups to continue to produce open source software, we need to start articulating what the business models are that can align with open source, and how to execute them.
He didn’t need to be right. He didn’t need them to agree. He needed everyone to put down the toxic rod. That starts with *him*, because he’s the only one with positional power.
I write a weekly newsletter about InfraOps - a new framework for revolutionizing corporate IT for multi-national corporations.
For a limited time, we're giving free copies of the books I review to random new subscribers of my newsletter.
It's free to subscribe 👇
Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot. From the GA of Copilot Chat, to the new Copilot Enterprise, to the Copilot Partner Program and so much more – we are expanding and infusing Copilot into every aspect of GitHub.
Boy, if AWS can figure out how to get Aurora PG working in serverless v2, it’s pretty tempting to just give every tenant a database, and let it scale to zero when nobody’s around.
Docker was a complete and total user experience revelation. In our rush to push things to "production", we totally destroyed what was beautiful for something that's deeply unwieldy, and very hard to do safely. In the last 3 years, it's gotten *worse*, not better.
I couldn’t disagree harder. Coupled with a component framework like React or Vue, tailwind dramatically increases the velocity of our engineering team. It takes far less time to learn. It has way fewer pitfalls.
Literally *everything* that happens in your cloud provider are things that we did, professionally, in datacenters, before there was a cloud provider. You can do them. It's not magic. You might choose not to! Which is great. I choose not to! But it's not because we can't. :)
Is anyone else realizing that the WFH era means they should actually buy a small laptop for travel, and a giant f-u workstation for home? It's taken me a year, but I'm pretty convinced.
If you were on the fence about PostgreSQL as a JSON store - so far, the pattern of using plpgsql functions as serde for the applications object model is.. fucking great. We'll see how life goes after we ship and have real load, but from a design perspective - its lovely.
I’ve been writing software of some kind the vast majority of my life. It remains hard to learn new technology, new languages, new approaches. If you’re just starting out, while the fundamentals won’t change, just know it’s okay to be confused. We are all confused sometimes. :)
There is a market opportunity for an alternative to k8s. You won’t “beat” it, but you don’t have to. You just have to decide to compete. Right now nobody even tries. Nomad is closest, and even their marketing is complimentary at heart.
If you had said “Docker sells to Mirantis” to anyone 5 years ago, they would have laughed you out of the room. Remember: there are no sure things, and who you help on the way up surely matters on the way down. And there is always a down.
The number of people arguing with me on twitter about whether you can run a highly available internet service outside the cloud and save money is shocking to me. :)
Hey friends! I gave a talk about "The War for the soul of Open Source" at
#OSCON
. People seemed to like it! You can watch it too, thanks to
@OReillyMedia
having a wonderfully liberal policy. Let me know what you think!
Today is a good day to practice empathy for people who had complex decisions to make, in a fast evolving landscape. It's easy to coach the outcome, but you have no idea what you really would have done faced with all the true complexity of Docker.
Yeah, come on - how can this be "doubling down on open"? Some true duplicity here. - we're taking two widely used, widely distributed, widely incorporated open source projects and making them no longer open source. But we're doubling down on open!
New podcast episode out now with the fantastic
@kelseyhightower
where we discuss his life, career, the importance of having hope, and advice to his younger self.
Available on all podcast platforms - just search "Danielle Newnham Podcast"
Enjoy!
Docker was a transformational user experience, one that remains unmatched today. Ask anyone running k8s if they wished it worked like that first ‘docker run’. The answer is yes.
But it won’t be, because it’s the Wild West, and my nerd friends are all got and bothered by the idea of non-fiat currency. This is why you want fiat currency. Because we can put you in jail when you pump and dump the public.
No, they shouldn’t. You know what behavior you need? Talking. More talking. So much more talking. I don’t need to minimize your chit chat or police your conversations. I need you talking to each other. All the time. About everything. Say hello all you want!
Every startup should incorporate the “no hello” rule internally.
We had this rule in Notion’s first internal communication guidelines. This may be one of the easiest ways to make Slack usage ten times better and have asynchronous communication that actually works. Share
Here’s a hot take for you: nobody wants an abstract cloud. You choose one because of the specific behaviors, and any abstraction worthy of the name will wind up lowest common denominator, or so leaky it’s not an abstraction at all: just syntax