HughMar 1

Last night I went to a 70th birthday party and ended up sitting next to Frank.

Frank used to work as a computer programmer, because this was the 1970s to 90s and people had normal job titles that described real things, instead of "full stack orchestration engineer" or "solutions architect".

Anyway Frank's employer was the Victorian Attorney General's department. He wrote, updated and maintained in-house software for managing the court system, trial documentation managements and so on using low level languages.

The point of this post is that there was nothing special about this period of history that made it possible for government departments to write and maintain their own software to solve their own problems then but not now.

The complete lack of any in-house capacity to do this kind of thing is a political choice. Frank is a reminder of that.

Show threadPaul_IPv6Mar 1

@hugh

the other sad part of this is that it's not only possible to self-host internally, it's vastly cheaper these days. you don't need a raised subfloor data center and multi-million dollar mainframes. a cluster of consumer or low end rackmount computers in a rack running linux scales way past where mainframes went and would solve most company/internal needs.

there is FOSS and people with the expertise to build, maintain, and secure it.

put the money into your people, not big-tech clouds and expensive proprietary software licenses and we all win.

Show threadJames Cape

@paul_ipv6 @hugh Counterpoint: where is your B site? What happens when your office catches fire, or floods, or has a power outage? What's your BCP? What does your HVAC look like? How do you handle offsite backups? How much are you willing to spend to reproduce all this infrastructure that the cloud provides as part of its cost?

I have no problem developing software for a bespoke task in-house, but "run a linux server" is about as far from a bespoke task as you can get, and a lot of the "just get a wire shelf of repurposed mid-towers with no thought for the morrow" is simply gambling with everyone's livelihood.

Mar 2 at 12:35pmWeb
Show threadPaul_IPv6Mar 2

@jcape @hugh

read the thread. i'm advocating for govt/large corp to actually hire and keep their own talent to do this. if they can't handle backups, offsite, redundancy, hire better. it's not an either or situation.

Show threadJames CapeMar 2
@paul_ipv6 @hugh Sir, I was responding to your post, where you wrote "a cluster of consumer or low end rackmount computers in a rack running linux scales way past where mainframes went and would solve most company/internal needs."
Show threadJames CapeMar 3
"oops someone quoted me making an ass of myself, time to block" -- some people, apparently.