If there is one thing that’s harder than making sensible build vs buy decisions in the first place, it’s being able to change your mind after you make that initial decision to build. Sunk cost fallacy is at the route of so many bad calls in IT

https://twitter.com/nicolefv/status/1491954969678782465

We can talk about making reasoned decisions based on facts and figures, but sunk cost fallacy at its heart is about emotion. Too much time, sweat, tears, social capital expended to give up now!

Sometimes, rather than a “hot failover” multi-region approach, sometimes a more sensible fallback degraded experience might make sense.

https://twitter.com/downtym/status/1375300835085717504

I remember at the Guardian they would regularly crawl the website. If the main system went down, a static site could be switched to easily in its place.

So a few people have asked why I have this snarky response. What is my problem with this service? Well, to be clear, it’s not an issue with GraphQL, it’s an issue with direct coupling with underlying datasources #thread

https://twitter.com/samnewman/status/1346541251617828877

The service as advertised makes it simple to map a GraphQL definition against a database. Now, what’s the problem with this? Well, the devil here is in the detail. But fundamentally it comes down to how important information hiding is to you.

There have been a lot of comments around this post from the Uber engineering team, highlighting the fact that some prior art here is misunderstood, with other ideas being presented as coming from Uber despite being well established prior art. #thread 1/17

https://twitter.com/samnewman/status/1287469517371826176?s=20

A cynical reading of posts like this could view the company trying to position itself as being more innovative than it actually is by limiting acknowledgement of prior art, and instead presenting themselves as the originators of these ideas. I don't think this is the case. 2/17

Apologies to the attendees at my @qconlondon talk for the abrupt end. I left you with many questions regarding how to solve joins! You view me exploring this in more detail here: (Thread) @qconlondon I also explore this explicit example in a lot more detail in Chapter 4 of Monoliths To Microservices - more information about how to read this here: samnewman.io/books/monolith…

I've been thinking for a while about how Amazon - specifically AWS - go about their product development (Thread!) Spend any time with the AWS web console, and you soon discover the distinct lack of consistency in interaction design from product to product. Annoying as this may be, from an outside perspective, it seems entirely intentional.

Is it me, or are people confusing dark launching and canary releases? Dark Launching, as originally described by Facebook back in 2008, relates to rolling out functionality in such a way that it is totally hidden from users. facebook.com/note.php?note_…

So I've been thinking a bit about Service Meshes, especially with the whole SMI (Service Mesh Interface) thing. (Thread) 1/18 As a tl;dr for what SMI is, it's a set of APIs to allow for common interop with different service meshes. In general, very happy for this, especially when it emerges ground up in the way this seems to have done. 2/18

I was in the middle of creating this slide (wrt patch hygiene) and had to stop half-way through and ask myself - aren’t we all just making this worse? We push immutable “phoenix” servers, and love that Docker makes that easy to implement, but unless you redeploy them, they remain un-patched. martinfowler.com/bliki/PhoenixS…