Desired state and DevOps

TL;DR This has turned into a long-winded rant, so what point am I trying to make here? Well, a couple of them: Whenever one says “desired state”, there should be some form of reconciliation, not just unidirectional change propagation. The deterministic portion of the reconciliation …

Goldilocks SaaS control planes

I find that reading the Building Multi-Tenant Architectures book leads to a lot of nodding in agreement, with the odd raised eyebrow. One moment that struck me relatively early on is that Tod Golding is not letting the reader get carried away with the features of the SaaS system they want to build …

The most dangerous word in software architecture

The most dangerous word in software architecture is “yes” — especially in its qualified form (“yes, but…” — where nobody will listen to the “but…” part). I was chatting with colleagues about our biggest failures as software architects. We’ve built the wrong thing, failed to build things, built them …

So, you want to do SaaS? Read this book chapter first.

It feels weird to endorse a book just on its first chapter but, in terms of ROI, this could be the most important chapter in the book. The introductory first chapter in Building Multi-Tenant SaaS Architectures by Tod Golding should be a must-read for everybody involved in a software as a service …

5 more mistakes people make when building SaaS software

As a follow-up to my comments on the InfoQ “QCon London: Mistakes People Make Building SaaS Software” post, I thought I would add my list of five additional common mistakes that I’ve seen SaaS product teams make. Mismatched revenue vs. cost scaling This is mostly a business …

Commentary: "Mistakes People Make Building SaaS Software"

I was amused to see a clickbait-y article pop in my RSS feeds from InfoQ: “QCon London: Mistakes People Make Building SaaS Software”. While it is hard to really judge the substance of the talk from this article, its “top ten mistakes” list is a pretty good conversation …

"We are not Google"

The most obvious, but also disregarded, piece of advice I used to give my colleagues is: “we are not Google”. By that I mean two things: that we were not operating at the scale of Google and, organizationally, we had nothing in common with Google engineering. As early partners of Google …

I guess I should write about stuff, now...

Now that I have more time on my hands and no longer have to follow my former employer’s social media policy (which, admittedly, had improved over the years from the original Omertà-like policy), I can write more freely about the things I have learned over the years. Funnily enough, …

It turns out that having a price watch on the Canon refurbished store is an expensive idea… Who knew?

AI utility

I really like this quote by Alex Komoroske (via Simon Willison). It may be confirmation bias, but I find that it is a good way to think about the utility of AI, whether plain-old “machine learning” or of the current hyped LLM variety: LLMs shouldn’t help you do less thinking, they …

Evaluating Peakto for picture library management

While my overall picture library isn’t huge, it is split between raw files edited in DxO PhotoLab, Apple Photos and a directory structure of legacy JPEGs taken with various digital cameras over the last 25 years. So, finding pictures or specific subjects is a bit of a challenge. This is not a …

"Write better code"

It’s pretty funny that all you apparently need to do to get better output from LLMs is to ask them to do better. Maybe I need to ask the JetBrains AI plugin to “write better code”. Of course, there is a gap between writing a simple program from scratch and writing contextually and …

AI-generated documentation

To clarify my snarky “junior developer” comment about code documentation in yesterday’s post about the JetBrains AI plugin, good documentation describes the intent of the code, it isn’t a blow-by-blow description of what the code does. While the ideal of literate programming …

Spending time with JetBrains AI

When it comes to the sci-fi trope of humanity ending at the hand of the machines, I’m in the camp of “The Creator” rather than “The Terminator” – it’ll be a software bug that does us in rather than machines achieving sentience and judging us unfit. Which …

Velcro strips are your friend

The Walksnail Goggle X Extension Board arrived just in time for me to try flying an analog tinywhoop quadcopter that (hopefully) will be easier for a beginner to manage in a small back yard. I don’t have much to add about it, especially now that “real” reviewers have had time to …

BetaFPV Meteor85 first flight hot takes

The unboxing and first flight experience with the BetaFPV Meteor85 (as a first-time quadcopter user) was… Something. Because the Meteor85 flight controller has SPI ELRS on board, flashed with ELRX 2.x firmware, the first thing I had to do was to flash the latest Betaflight firmware on the …

Getting the Walksnail Avatar Goggles X to work with a Mac

Getting the Walksnail Avatar Goggles X to work with a Mac is rather annoying, but not quite the impossibility Caddx claim it to be: The first challenge is dealing with the recessed HDMI-in micro-HDMI connector. In the end, I ordered a cable with a plastic (rather than metal) connector body and …

Goggles X HDMI-in "gate"

Walksnail Avatar Goggles X update: as reviewers noted, the HDMI-in connector (a mini-HDMI connector, as noted) is recessed and 🤬 is it difficult to find a mini-HDMI cable to fit! It seems that I’m going to be buying a bunch of cables from Amazon until I can find one that has a skinny enough …

Walksnail Avatar Goggles X first impressions

They are a lot smaller in-person than they look in pictures. The IPD range is generous, but definitely needed — I am almost at the widest end of the range. The diopter adjustment range is sufficient for me. Putting the goggles on is a learned skill: you have to focus on a distant point in order for …

All the HDMIs

Wow. The electronics industry will apparently never learn. After the whole USB connector history, I discovered today that HDMI has done the same damn thing: in addition to HDMI, there is mini-HDMI (a.k.a., “type C” – as used by FPV goggles), not to be confused with micro-HDMI …

PFV drones are one weird hobby

I can’t say that I’m short of hobbies, but I decided to look into FPV drones. I originally was tempted by camera drones, but I don’t live anywhere photogenic or travel to one, plus they are definite Karen magnets. I think that one thing that attracted me to FPV drones is the fact …

Disney Bundle? Disney Boondoggle!

Tried to merge my Disney+ and Hulu accounts into a bundle. Nope. Can’t do that. I need to delete them, wait for the end of their billing cycles and only then re-create my account as a bundle. Well, the accounts are deleted. I sure hope I remember to create a new one next month…

OrbStack

One of those “Holy shit! How did I miss this?” moments: I ran across a mention of OrbStack in a discussion thread recently and checked it out. The way people describe it as a better Docker for Mac is true, but it also is basically WSL2 for the Mac, too. Don’t get me wrong, having a …

Modern air travel, timeless pet peeves

This trip is teaching me the difference between the merely annoying (my luggage being delivered 4 days late thanks to United Airlines) and infuriating (SAS airport personnel playing the “head of the line says you don’t need any forms, the end of the line says you do need the forms, go away and get …

I guess that I can only have as many YubiKeys as I have nail polish colors to identify them…