I feel sympathy for all the engs at companies I've implemented CI/CD based on Gh Actions in recent years. It's not like I didn't tell them that Github showed to be somewhat unreliable in the recent years and in contrast to their claim "it's just the build pipeline, not the product" I think it is a horrible incident if you're not able to deploy to production and have barely any ad-hoc backup.
I'm always evangelizing Argo or Flux and some self-hosted Gitlab or gitea, but seems like they all prefer to throw their money at Github as of now.
In Germany, they introduced a system called "Grüner Punkt" (~green dot) in the 90s which was supposed to teach consumers how to separate different kinds of trash to be able to recycle the packaging plastic.
Now about 30 years later, the Germans are eager to sort their trash but the recycling quote is still laughably low. Less than 20% of sorted trash gets recycled for usage in plastic (and instead just burned, reusing the thermal energy) and people still have ridiculous habits (e.g. wrapping Bananas with plastic bags).
What we see is: It's all damn industry lies, one part of politicians susceptible for industry lobbying, the other part of politicians antagonized for "limiting consumer freedom", a lot of green-/whitewashing campaigns and consumers who refuse to change their habits.
GreenDot implementation as a business case for recycling economics was examined here in California when the Electronics Recycling was in formation. There were some structural problems with the way that money moved through the system, the product categories, the marking system and the handling systems. Improvements are possible, and the obstacles in the GreenDot system are real.
German speaking. You can take German IT to get an idea what would have happened to SWE if you'd have kept those bureaucratic methods from the 2000s as the backbone of all SWE endeavors: a horrible, expensive, non-working mess with barely any progress.
I think what many people, esp. from outside the SWE world, don't get: Software engineering is a deeply social kind of work. There are dozens of solutions for the given problems, you have to agree on one that works for all peers. That's the job. Optimizing it for drawing funny diagrams is not an issue if not for communication.
I'm also interested in the german software engineering culture. And also, heavy plus to this being a social problem more than a "engineers just need more time" problem. I tried to articulate this in another comment of mine but mostly beat around the bush. This is more directly what I was attempting to say.
Well in my theory core reason is that Germany never developed a thriving startup IT economy[0] that was ever relevant for the GDP, especially not in comparison with the industrial sectors (cars, steel, chemistry) and so IT completely got ignored by politicians.
That resulted in no one who'd challenge the biggest gatekeepers Telekom and SAP, so they lobbied for and enforced whatever they wanted[1].
If you study CS in a German university you can easily get an MA without being able to write software at all (I personally happen to know several people). German universities teach what is easy to teach top down and test for: The textbook stuff that came out of the whole Java EE/OOP/SOAP/UML sector. You barely get practical coding lessons and can avoid them completely if you want. The academic sector never realized how crappy German software products are and never bothered looking at what Big Tech is doing. With given data protection and soon AI regulations, as a university you'd have a hard time collecting enough training data because your law department would step in referring to the current legal insecurity (I've heard stories from friends).
Then we have this little crazy island Berlin which up until maybe 10ys ago was mainly driven by the infamous Rocket Internet "startup incubator" which is led by a couple of MBA sociopath billionaires, trying to copycat everything from SV and then sell it back to the SV company whenever they wanted to start conquering Europe. Thing is they never really developed enough SWE excellence to get the copycat successful in Germany or anywhere in Europe (with some exceptions).
Third example? Here you are: Today I learned that the gov't already decided 20ys ago that they want to provide all usual governmental services online. 20ys later they (allegedly) poured 3.5Bn EUR into an unholy setup of consulting businesses, incompetent civil servants and a panel of software architect astronauts who could never really agree on things.
All their deliverables are click-dummies, gazillions of PDFs with SOAP/WSDL/OMG/UML thingies and prototype projects rolled out in "experimental" cities. So if you happen to live in Bremen you might be able to register your dog online but not in Berlin. Therefore in Berlin you might be able to get a license plate for your car online. Pretty much all governmental projects (Covid vaccination registration, special governmental aid for students because of high inflation, etc.) broke down because all their systems are incapable of handling more than maybe 10k visitors (in my theory it always breaks down whenever the biggest single Oracle DB host they could buy is going down).
Germany has some decent software engineers, especially if they're self-trained and not brainwashed by one of the universities or big corps. But the environment manages to regularly piss them off and make em emigrate to somewhere else.
Ouff, much text. Hope at least someone enjoys reading it.
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[0] This is because if you start a company in Germany you're faced with horrible bureaucracy wrt taxes, laws, politics, governmental authorities, etc. For example, you're forced to pay for a membership in a funny non-IT institution called "Industrie- und Handelskammer (IHK)" which essentially consists of a crowd of old men who are officially supposed to lobby for you and create a networking environment but if you ask them something like "hey, can you tell me how many companies are having problem XYZ right now?" they will tell you that they don't have any numbers and have no means to collect them. In 2023 they still send out a meaningless paper printed magazine. So not helpful at all but take a significant share of your gross turnover mainly to pay for their pensions.
Additionally, with all the regulations the governments set up over years they're now facing a significant cut in civil servants because Germany is getting older and older. As a result they're not having enough people to enforce or check regulations in time and never managed to develop any IT-based systems. Big problem with the influx of refugees in recent years and affects many other concerns as well.
Finally, there's this cultural difference to, e.g., the US that average Germans are not business-savy at all. If you tell the average German mom that you want to start a business, she will tell you that you're a dreamer and should get a proper job. Germans generally tend to think that companies are something god-given.
[1] They are still the go-to businesses if the gov't quickly needs something, like the Covid tracing app which German tax payers AFAIR ended up paying 120M EUR for (lol).
I just read up on the IHK and it sounds like the equivalent for business that an employee pays to be a member of a union. The fee is 47 EUR + 0.14% of gross income, which is not exactly "significant" compared to the other fees, taxes etc.
As for the old people running the IHK, from what I read, the membership is one-company-one-vote, so what stops people running for election?
As for the influx of refugees, that is a distinct advantage to Germany of an increased availability of workers, including many educated Syrians and others.
So it sounds like there's a problem with entrepreneurship in Germany outside the engineering / petro-chemical businesses. There's also a problem with your political choices due to the usual issues prevalent in every Western country. An aging population, the effects of the "financial industry" (a misnomer if ever there was one), the effects of climate change, etc.
I think AOP is a fair tool.. for maybe 1% of of your day to day problems.
I'd say it's okay to use in combination with OOP when you (and your team) manage to strictly keep the Domain/Business stuff in OOP world and the infrastructural stuff (logging) in AOP. Whenever you start mixing any of these together or have overlapping concerns, then things will quickly get very messy. While logging is fine with AOP e.g. with Access control things easily get mixed up over time.
When I look back the last 1-2 decades, the pattern that I see is that one principle always won: Simplicity.
I'd like to end up with a little war story:
In 2017 I happened to work at a startup (~60 engineers) that started with a gazillion of Microservices in dozens of different languages and ecosystems. Then there was this Clojure guy that didn't even do that much of missionary work. When people started reading each others codebases they realized the simplicity of Clojure and later started porting/rewriting their things to it.
At the same time, everything Scala was frowned upon; I vividly remember trying to understand the request a supposedly simple CRUD service was making to another service and I couldn't understand the program flow for like 2h.
Needless to say that probably like 80% of the services ended up being rewritten in Clojure and the Clojure guy got called the Johnny Appleseed of the company.
LE should have tools to enforce the law, no question.
However, there's a huge difference between (a) setting up means for spying on 100% of the people and (b) developing operational excellence in LE to be able to follow individual cases.
Usually the path of (a) is followed because of mental laziness of politicians, assumed cost-saving, lobbying by some companies who want to sell their LE Big Data product and BS megalomania. Citizens have to stand up and fight against getting criminalized.
> setting up means for spying on 100% of the people
These means have existed since for ever. Phone taps have been around for as long as phones have existed, way before they became smart. Letters can be opened, everything can be intercepted. Even "pizzino".
Before "everything digital" it was logistically barely possible to spy on 100%. At times of GDR a mayor of the Stasi had resources to maybe wire-tap 50 people. Letters can only be opened for X amount of people. Now they have the possibilities to do 100%. That's a big difference.
> it was logistically barely possible to spy on 100%
It still is. LE barely has enough capacity to fight every criminal, let alone watch 100% of everything everyone does online. And if you look at how tough a time social media are having at content moderation it seems like tools to automate this well don't exist yet. Just look at stories like this:
In Germany they recently had a judge to allow for a swoop on annoying but harmless climate activists, including freezing their bank accounts and confiscating their homepage (in ridiculous ways, bc they only took the server and forgot assuming control over the domain).
It was very obvious that the ruling was politically motivated and they treated the climate activists like terrorists. What's alarming is that our governments seem to get more and more repressive.
Question: Assuming PKI is "solved" (whatever that means) isn't mTLS in contrast to sth like a VPN the preferred solution nowadays? Or both? I'm asking because Wireguard itself looks a lot like mTLS to me and I'm curious how HN people currently see that context.
WireGuard is a better, safer protocol than mTLS. If you can use WireGuard, that's what you should use (often you can't, because you don't want IP addressing between your components).
Well using the aws cli is locking you in to AWS, isn't it? And at least from my experience those "just 50 lines of shell" can get very messy overtime. Eventually, if you add more features (pretty much every project gets more features over time), you will refactor once or twice and end up rewriting it in Python, make it more declarative because it's easier to test and tada, you just reinvented Ansible yourself. I think this question is legit.
Reading your comment I can't help but think about that we're now starting to feed our layer lasagne that "mostly works" with code generated by a stochastic parrot which also only "mostly works" and turn the resulting products into some kind of fabric of the society. Ten years from now must be a fun time.
"When I started, all I had was swamp! Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em! It sank into the swamp, so I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. I built a third one. It burned down, fell over, and then it sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up! And that's what you're going to get, lad--the strongest castle on these islands!"
You laugh, but... AI only got real traction when we stopped teaching computers clever efficient ways to solve logic puzzles and started throwing massive amounts of data, memory, and compute at the problem.
Recently, I've been thinking about using Asahi as the host system running on my M1 MBA and run everything macOS in a vm. Does anyone have experience with that? How stupid would that be?
People have gotten QEMU with KVM running VMs and other people have gotten macOS ARM64 running under QEMU... so I think technically possible, though I haven't actually tried going that far with it. I don't think you'd get virtual GPU acceleration support working in the current state, so performance would be pretty god awful.
I'm always evangelizing Argo or Flux and some self-hosted Gitlab or gitea, but seems like they all prefer to throw their money at Github as of now.