network engineer,
#Debian #FreeBSD and #OpenBSD
moar #DNS nowadays #anycast #nonprofit
oh and #Perl, a bit of #Go
#nocloud #noai
| first name | Tamás |
| also known as | cstamas, tom |
I recently read Warren Buffett describe the moat¹ as one of key things to consider when evaluating a business. That is, how protected a business is from incursion by competitors.
This seemed like the perfect *inverse* metric of companies with which I want to do business.
I prefer to engage with businesses where they *know* I have a choice and they take steps to make me *want* to be there. They have an exit-ramp for me to take my business elsewhere if they don't compete for it. They have great products. They have great service.
It's why I like standards. Didn't like my mail-provider? I just connected via IMAP, cloned over my data to a new host, updated my DNS records, and done. Same with web-hosts. Or my mail-software (sorry, Thunderbird). Or automotive businesses.
So financial firms might recommend a business because of the moat, and it might be a green flag for purchasing stock.
But it's a definite 🚩red flag🚩 when it comes to entering a business relationship.
Every developer or dev team can relate -
A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5
RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116188939207308679
Happiness is watching the 800lb gorilla in your industry careen like a drunkard from one critical mistake to another, over and over
Of course Oracle kind of did it to themselves too, when they changed the BDB license to AGPLv3 in 2013. This prompted Debian to look for alternatives, and #LMDB emerged as the only suitable candidate.
https://lwn.net/Articles/558154/
A bonus from modeling LMDB on the BDB API - we did this to ease development of back-mdb based on back-bdb. But that also meant it was easy for every other project using BDB to migrate too. And after these licensing games, they were eager to migrate so LMDB use exploded.
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.