Ted Dziuba

“Node makes it impossible to write blocking code” reminds me of this classic and hilarious piece by Ted Dziuba: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/10/node-js-is-cancer.html

almost 20 years ago the exact same sentiment was expressed in the ground breaking classic "I'm going to scale my foot up your ass" by Ted Dziuba http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2008/04/im-going-to-scale-my-foot-…

Great post thanks for sharing. I also highlight this one: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/12/process.html

They've probably subscribed to Taco Bell Programming. http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

heh I've noticed this, too. There are a group of us at work that are known as "git surgeons", maybe that's the modifying noun you're looking for! In general, claiming status as a <technology> <noun> will get you positive attention, as long as it doesn't come off too arrogant (e.g. expert, master, w/e) e.g. git guru, nix nerd. It reminds me of this excellent article [0] that I like to share with all the engineers I work with, every year or so. In that case, you'd be a "taco bell programmer". But it's maybe too self-effacing depending on your opinion of taco bell :) [0]: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

First I've heard of "Taco Bell Programming"[1]. I love it, this needs to become a normal part of my lexicon. Also heck yes, it completely mirrors my experience - a few dozen tools combine in fairly simple ways to make absurdly useful results. The problem is finding the useful N-dozen elemental tools you'll use. [1]: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

I ran across a great quote that sums up the situation. ...functionality is an asset, but code is a liability. http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html Don't know if the OP came up with it himself, but he is now a candidate for the California State Senate.

I'll leave this here: https://www.slideshare.net/iammutex/what-every-data-programmer-needs-t… https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-data-sessions/97814… TL;DR Disk IO is pretty much a black box in virtualized environments. All the cool stuff you can do with disks (and memory, and tmpfs) to improve performance seems worth hosting your own hardware. Personally I'd just read everything Ted Dziuba wrote and rethink how much "Ops" is dying. http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/archives.html Maybe it's just being replaced by a bunch of code to fix problems caused by "cloud" hosting performance bottlenecks. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad, but you should be aware that you're probably trading time managing and picking hardware that suits your needs for additional coding time.

My eyebrows lifted somewhat when I read that sentence. Bit of a bad case of "Works on my machine". Reminded me of an amusing blog post by Ted Dziuba [0], less so the rant about Apple kit, more about the mindset of certain groups of developers don't stop and think about where their shit will run before churning out 2 months worth of code that "worked on their machine". [0]: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/03/osx-unsuitable-web-develop…

Same experience here. As a small organization, the quotes we got from cloud providers have always been prohibitively expensive compared to running things locally, even when we accounted for geographical redundancy, generous labor costs, etc. Plus, we get to keep know how and avoid lock-in, which are extremely important things in the long term. Besides, running things locally can be refreshingly simple if you are just starting something and you don't need tons of extra stuff, which becomes accidental complexity between you, the problem, and a solution. This old post described that point quite well by comparing Unix to Taco Bell: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html… See HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10829512. I am sure for some use-cases cloud services might be worth it, especially if you are a large organization and you get huge discounts. But I see lots of business types blindly advocating for clouds, without understanding costs and technical tradeoffs. Fortunately, the trend seems to be plateauing. I see an increasing demand for people with HPC, DB administration, and sysadmin skills.

The Way(tm) that I was taught/experienced is as follows: o Logs are there for ignoring. You need them precisely twice: once when you are developing, and once when the thing's gone to shit, but they are never verbose enough when you need them. o Using logs to derive metrics is an expensive fools errand pushed by splunk and the cloud equivalents(ie cloudwatch and the like). Its slow, inaccurate and horrendously expensive. o using logs for monitoring is a fools errand. Its always too slow, and really really fucking brittle. o metrics are king. o pull model metrics is an antipattern o Graphite + grafana is still actually quite good, although time resolution isn't there. o You need to raid your metrics stores o We had a bunch of metrics servers in a raid 1, which were then in a raid 0 for performance, all behind loadbalancers and DNS Cnames with a really low TTL. o Cloudwatch metrics are utterly shite o Cloudwatch is actually entirely shit. o tracing is great, and brilliant for performance monitoring. o Xray from AWS is good, but only really for lambdas. o tracing is fragile and doesn't really plug and play end to end, unless you have the engineering discipline to enforce "the one true" tracing system everywhere but what do you monitor? http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/03/monitoring-theory.html this still is canonical. In short, everything should have a minimum set of graphs, CPU, Memory, connections, upstream service response times hits per second and…

Not what you're after, but your talk of beans reminded me of Taco Bell Programming. [0] [0] https://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.htm…

Earlier in 2010 - http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

This reminds me of the famous Taco Bell Programming post [1]. Simple can surprisingly often be good enough. [1] http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

My go to page about this is http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2008/04/im-going-to-scale-my-foot-… which perfectly summarizes the problem AND solution

Someone posted this link the other day. http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/12/process.html I must say I wholeheartedly agree with Rule 4.

I am aging myself, but: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2008/04/im-going-to-scale-my-foot-… The bit that stuck with me (re-reading for the first time since 2008, I forgot how aggressive it was): "Scalability is not your problem, getting people to give a shit is."

>> http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html > Here's a concrete example: suppose you have millions of web pages that you want to download and save to disk for later processing. How do you do it? The cool-kids answer is to write a distributed crawler in Clojure and run it on EC2, handing out jobs with a message queue like SQS or ZeroMQ. > The Taco Bell answer? xargs and wget. In the rare case that you saturate the network connection, add some split and rsync. A "distributed crawler" is really only like 10 lines of shell script. I generally agree, but it's probably only 10 lines if you assume you never have to deal with any errors.

I read similar on HN sometime back, this is call Taco Bell Programming - http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

Unicorn. Somewhat off topic, and speaking of unicorns: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/07/the-craigslist-reverse-pro…

this somewhat reminds me of taco bell programming http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

Honorary mention of Taco Bell Programming. (fits this genre). http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html Someone ought to write - Zen and the art of Unix tools usage.

Spreadsheets are awesome, and I think that another thing people are dismissing is grep, awk and friends. I get it that both spreadsheets and unix tools might not be trendy, but they fulfill the Taco Bell Programming idea [1]; they provide simple, scalable, and efficient solutions. Summing data from column B for each unique value in column A would be as easy as `awk -F ',' '{a[$1] += $2} END{for (i in a) print i, a[i]}' my-input-file.csv'` Sure, it would take a few tries to get right, but could for example R do something this concise and dynamic that can run in parallel? [1] http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

Interestingly someone just posted this: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/10/node-js-is-cancer.html Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393747

Does this add anything to the Taco Bell post linked in TFA? I suggest changing the link to: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

Agree, but you have to be willing to invest your time and effort into a task when you look for it that way. Sometimes you can be better off doing things the simple aka duct tape way, when it just works. Anyone who's not read tacobell programming should take the 2 minutes to do so now because it underlines my point very good. http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html Incase my point is not clear: you have to differentiate, the concept of work with the concept of problem solving.

So true. I like the idea of taco bell programming: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

This article is also on Ted Dziuba's current site, where you don't need to go way back to see it: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

Cool ideas here even though a lot of comments are pouring water on it. Reminds me of this post by Ted dzubia where he uses makefiles for data processing [1]. I like reading about novel uses of tools other than their original intent. 1- http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/02/stupid-unix-tricks-workflo…

As to your question of “how long already”, I found a blog post (not mine) from 2000 A.D. that considers “The Future of Apple's Curated Computing”: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/05/the-future-of-apples-curat…