✨ Phil Calçado
@pcalcado
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Led engineering for companies w/ millions of users but no revenue or millions in revenue but no users. Now making AI work for the enterprise at https://t.co/1JvAx63mT2
New York, NY
Joined November 2007
Sun Microsystems, circa 2006. Research engineer: We strongly believe that the future of data centers is containerization. Marketing department: Got you, fam:
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I’m thinking about the many, many amazing talks and case studies Twitter engineering published over the last decade about how insane was it to keep the site up during World Cups. Well, guess what starts in about a week?.
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OH: I now officially work with people younger than my .emacs file.
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Rammstein makes German sound so bad ass. And then you come live here and it’s all about "tschüssi" and "bitte schön". Enttäuschung!.
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Your best algorithms are still no match for my last name, Google.
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Working for infrastructure startups in 2017. Expectation: "Come work with service mesh and Kubernetes and the bleeding edge development in infrastructure software". Reality: "$ man iptables".
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This whole "new exec joins a smaller company from big tech, wants to fire everyone and replace with big tech engineers to ''level up'' hiring" thing happens so often should be cataloged as an anti-pattern for tech leadership.
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It's been seven years and I am still upset about Google Reader.
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That so many of us are using GitHub Actions instead of a purpose-built product for CI/CD tooling is a testament to how massive distribution can cause an okay-ish tool to take huge market share from much better ones.
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I see a huge correlation between "we have too many meetings" and people with open laptops doing work during meetings. Maybe requiring focus is a good tool to reduce the number of meetings? 🤔.
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Designing software in Go is pretty much stopping every time you face an open question and asking yourself:. "What would Java 1.4 do?".
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— . a shared database as integration between systems!.— Lol, u crazy bro? 😂.— Ok, let's use the binlog to share data between services! .— Wtf have you never read an engineering book in your life? 👎🏽.— Let's pump the binlog into Kafka and call it a stream?.— Now we talking! 😍.
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OH: .—" what's your database fail over story?" .— "Oh, mate it's like if it fails we're over".
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I am so ridiculously impressed with the UX of some of these CLI tools, it's crazy shit.
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Most companies have it all wrong.They don't have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them. http://tinyurl.com/dfo8o7.
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Resources:.- don't learn from experience.- don't have personal stuff to deal with.- can't be a 10x multiplier.- don't have dreams and aspirations.- don't resign.- are commodities. One more time: People aren't resources.
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In 20 years of playing this game, I see a massive correlation between code that is unit-testable and well-designed. It might be an accidental or genuine correlation. It doesn't matter. To me, writing testable code is the laziest (i.e., most efficient) way to design code well.
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Friday is gratuitous controversy day! Here's one for you all: . Many ex-SoundCloud and ex-ThoughtWorks friends who joined Spotify NYC/Sweden tell me the "Squad Model" matrix org doesn't work as advertised and that they can only get work done by circumventing it. Thoughts?.
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Every Brazilian tech company will eventually build a system called Neymar.
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Encapsulation is mostly about making code easier to delete.
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It makes me really happy when I'm able to replace existing code comments with tests.
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People have to invest months "clearing" 100+ useless exercises on to get a job at FANG but no time on actually useful engineering skills. The prevalence of big tech interview processes is the worst thing that has happened to software engineering in a while.
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My first blog post in ages: How we ended up with microservices. http://t.co/GOWjqyiBDx
#in.
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The first screenshot feels like your typical 80s/90s literature on Object-Orientation. The second screenshot is the original text, before I ran find/replace "Service" with "Object". (from Helland, P. "Data on the outside versus data on the inside")
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It feels like every single company is "building a Heroku.". Everyone except Salesforce.
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You say "Single-Page App + Backend-as-a-Service", I say "The 90s called, they want their Client-Server Architecture back".
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Every few years we are conned by a new programming language selling itself as "so simple we don't need frameworks or patterns", just to see that community waste time reinventing these inch by inch as we face real-world engineering problems.
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A little known fact is that approximately 47% of CPU usage across a typical Kubernetes cluster is invested translating between JSON and YAML.
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Some engineers don't care about the problem as long as they get to use interesting tools. Others don't care about the tools they use as long as they get to solve an interesting problem. Both mindsets are great, but a recipe for misery when misaligned with the organization needs.
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-> People on the Internet:. Go was DESIGNED from the GROUND UP to FORCE people to THINK about handling ERRORS in this imperfect world of ours. -> Every large enough Go codebase:. result, _ := doSomethingRisky().
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We totally lost the whole "DevOps isn't a role/team/tools" battle didn't we? . We keep losing these battles. Maybe a new strategy next time?.
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I believe we are starting to see the consequences of Google-style performance processes that focus on individual impact versus teamwork infecting the industry. In both product and infrastructure, what gets built or maintained is whatever drives someone's promotion and that only.
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Faz 13 anos que saí do Brasil. Não se ponham pra baixo por comentários arrogantes como esse. Quanto mais produzimos em inglês mais o mundo vai ver o Brasil e nós brasileiros como uma potência em tech. Sotaque todos temos, até nativos. Estude pronúncia, mas não tenha vergonha!.
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Mostly agree with Vic here, but I'm not 100% convinced anyone can survive in this industry without deep Lambada skills. How do you think Brazilians are taking over tech?.
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Git is a decentralized version control system. Decentralization is important because it removes a single point of failure, as every client is its own. — Yo, sorry to interrupt but did you see Github is down?. — Oh shit. See you Monday then!.
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Prediction: In a few years, the CTO of a hot startup will give a keynote explaining how they do what is essentially trunk-based development, probably with a different name, and we'll all get back to it.
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I just collaborated on something asynchronously, in an email thread instead of attention-grabbing Slack, and it feels fucking amazing.
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On a small scale, it does not matter what you use: everything works. On a large scale, it does not matter what you use: nothing works. The devil is in the middle.
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Mastodon feels a lot like Battlestar Galactica’s refugee fleet right now.
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Fun fact: Golang is a single PHP file called “go.php”. No frameworks. No libraries (except jQuery).
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I just published a new article on Service Mesh as a microservices pattern: .
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Monoliths are fine if you are committed to them. (Micro)services are fine if you are committed to them. Microliths are what happens when an organization isn't brave enough to pick a lane. The worst of both worlds without the advantages of any of them.
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RabbitMQ is the Wordpress of messaging systems. Great user experience, simple to scale down and run locally, simple to abuse, a fucking nightmare in production, will likely result in you being paged at 3am to clean up shit.
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I am forever grateful to @TwitterDev for @finagle. We would look at some obscure feature in it and be "wtf" but every few million users we added our shit break in new ways and we would go "Aha!". They packaged years of handling fail whales into a library; this is no small feat.
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Having a "DevOps team" is like hiring someone off Craigslist to go to the gym in your place.
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Also let’s just take a minute to acknowledge that the “crazy tech stack” developed by Twitter was reused by SoundCloud, Tumblr, Pinterest, Foursquare, Apple, Etsy, Nest, PagerDuty, Strava, Tinder, and many other top internet companies.
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Redhat develops Java plugin for VisualStudio, which is a great editor for Macs. Nothing makes sense anymore.
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Accidentally turned neighbours' hue bulbs purple. They started blasting Beyonce from my Bluetooth speakers. Internet of Other People's Shit.
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@promptsurfer @dhh SoundCloud was born on Rails but we started migrating off it in 2014. Only legacy is left.
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Funny how often "stand-up meetings” degrade into the exact long, inefficient, pro-forma status report meetings they were meant to replace.
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NIH in management is a thing. Ask your manager what was the last management book they read. Hold them accountable for learning new skills and tools, instead of just winging it. Don't let you manager make your team guinea pigs for management practices they're making up as they go.
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Everybody loves IPv6 until they have to manually enter an address.
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How is it unacceptable for an engineer not to know the latest frameworks, tools, and design patterns, but it is totally ok and normal for their managers to never ever read a book on management?. (and I don't mean those books that spend 200 pages talking about how to run a 1:1).
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"Internal Open Source" is just another way to say "Nobody owns this thing that some ninja rockstar 10x coder built instead of working on the backlog and now somehow made its way into our critical path.".
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It is really frustrating that so many people produce great content for free only to have @Medium lock it behind a paywall. @Medium is similar to what Elsevier and Springer do to academic journals, probably worse. #dropMedium.
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It's my birthday, so as per the time-honored tradition, here's a confession:. I never know when something is an upstream or downstream service. I use these terms interchangeably. Thirty-seven years and nobody ever caught me. Crime pays.
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Friends, we don't need new programming languages for cloud-native configuration, our current languages are just fine—except YAML, go fuck yourself YAML. What we need is APIs with decent levels of abstraction that don't expose implementation details most people don't care about.
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These days, even Twitter threads need a tl;dr or people get bored and won't read. but I am a stubborn idiot, and that's why I wrote a 20-page article on how my teams have used RFC processes at Meetup, SoundCloud, DigitalOcean, and ThoughtWorks: .
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This morning I offered to help a blind woman cross the street near times square. She looked puzzled by the offer. It turns out she wasn't blind, she was just wearing sunglasses, and that thing in her hand was a selfie stick.
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Join a startup: work on imaginary problems and get paid with imaginary money!.
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I'm guessing it is something special when you add the first book you ever wrote to your bookshelf?
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Ok, I know it is crazy idea, guys, but bear with me for a second. What if, instead of this. // Checks if the user has paid their bills.def ValidatePaybaleState(. ) {. we wrote this:. def ChecksIfUserHasPaidTheirBills(. ) {. ?.
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Observability in the 2020s be like:. 1 - Spend one year migrating to a new telemetry product.2 - Use it for two years.3 - Sticker shock 😱 when the renewal contract comes in .4 - Spend another year migrating to a new platform.5 - Back to 2.
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I am happy to let y'all know that my "funemployment" is coming to an end next week. But before I talk about that, let me talk about five things I have learned over the last few months about looking for a senior leadership role:.
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Little known fact: 80% of improving the overall scalability of a microservices-based architecture is threatening people that you will buy loudspeakers and blast Brazilian country music loud in the office if they don't set explicit timeouts and connection limits in their systems.
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I have used Macs exclusively since 2006. I still have to look down at the keyboard every single time I see these stupid symbols.
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Engineers, designers, etc. are often expected to constantly learn new tools and techniques to get better or even just to remain employable. OTOH, most managers I know get by with just "management training" (aka our annual Patrick Lencioni book club) and gut feel. How is this ok?.
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At SoundCloud, we called it mothership.At DigitalOcean, we called it Alpha.At Meetup, we called it Chapstick.Twitter called it monorail. How do you call your monolith?.
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The funny thing about this “Ooh big tech doesn’t use scrum/agile” is the failed assumption big tech is good at running projects. Unless you can afford 7 engineers, $800k each, spend months adding one button to your advertiser dashboard, I wouldn’t recommend following their lead.
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The best way to be absolutely sure that a piece of software will make it to production is by calling it a prototype.
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Any sufficiently complicated microservices arch contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Finagle.
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This is me trying to organise a pub night with 5 friends who don't use any messaging app in common. This future sucks.
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I think about 10% of all code reviews I've ever done end up being me paraphrasing or straight up linking to @martinfowler's "Published vs. Public interfaces".
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In the long run, what makes one a valuable team member isn’t what they know, but their ability&desire to learn entirely new skills as needed.
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Things change so quickly. What was new a second ago is old now. New tech shapes new and unpredictable behavior. This is scary and confusing. That is why once a day, I like to stare at an Atlassian product and experience that warm and fuzzy feeling that we are still in 2009.
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The easiest way to make sure something makes it to production is calling it a "prototype".
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Thought-provoking comment from a friend who's been at Google for years: "Google-style 'tech' interviews, with whiteboard puzzle solving, aren't tech interviews they're cultural fit interviews. They want to know if you look and feel like them. Google does no actual tech interview".
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For the 2 of you who care (hi, mum!) I have a new home: By year's end I'll be joining @DigitalOcean in NYC. Super stoked!.
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As an immigrant who has lived in 3 countries with universal healthcare prior to the US, that period btw jobs when you don't have health insurance because you don't want to pay an arm and a leg for COBRA is so scary it blows my mind how people were trained to think of it as normal.
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"How come Brazil picked up the pace on vaccination rates so quickly with Bolsonaro's anti-vaxx federal government?". Well, local and states' government be like. .
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Serverless architectures tend to look so much like Old School database-driven ones, full of triggers implementing business logic, that I'm legit surprised I can't write Lambdas in PL/SQL or T-SQL.
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I wrote something about my experience with recruiting and what we're up to at @digitalocean Feedback please:
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If you are thinking about naming a package or module "util" you might as well bite the bullet and call it "black hole".
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It's a sad state of affairs when someone, especially a parent, needs to use their free time doing coding puzzles so that they can change jobs. They aren't investing in becoming a better engineer, they're just memorizing the answers that the interviewers want to hear.
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