alt Hacker NewsThese optimizations are impressive, but it gets me thinking: at what point does a company become a collection of impenetrable siloes, where nothing really does what you expect? Maybe know with AI this is less of an issue as exploring a codebase is also much faster.
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The trick is to keep the silos losely coupled and small enough that you can understand it reasonably quickly. A component like the one in the article is pretty good like that. It just routes traffic according to weights. It doesn't care what the weights represent. It doesn't care where the servers are. It doesn't care what the traffic is
The team that owns it needs to understand it. Everyone else can just use it.
My intuition around larger companies is they are already impenetrable silos, and AI makes it worse
>at what point does a company become a collection of impenetrable siloes, where nothing really does what you expect?
Around the year 2015.
Actually, AI creates spaghetti faster than any human ever could before.
And at what point does a company start to care about performance? 100TB of RAM is expensive as hell, but getting products to market faster was worth the cost
I feel like any company whose products have RESTful interfaces are already there…
One wants to turn on an indicator on a remote device. A simple Boolean value. But we need networking, TLS, authentication plugins, certificate validation, distributed logging, containers, orchestration, HTTP client/server, interprocess communication, daemon dependency management, …
Sure, one can say each of these layers and abstractions has an important and justifiable purpose. But one can also step back and start wondering - what the hell are we really doing???
At some level, it seems like each layer of abstraction has to manage others, only simply because they exist.
Imagine the simplicity of 1800s telegraph signaling - no software!
Too often we build systems with Fortune-50 style hierarchies when a 5-person team could do the whole job.