maintenance
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🛣️ The two ditches
Along roads, there is often a ditch or some undesirable obstacle on either side of the road you want to avoid. The same can be said for most of life, including product development. There are two common errors: Build it all yourself: You dr…
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⚖️ Reliability tradeoffs
Recently, one of our servers running Arch Linux refused to boot after updates. The fix was to comment out a line in the /etc/default/grub file. It took about 15 minutes to find and everything was done in a rescue terminal — no need to boot …
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⚖️ Technical debt compounds with you doing nothing
Technical debt is like any other kind of debt – it accrues when nothing is done. This is perhaps the most insidious aspect of debt. How does technical debt work? Mainly that software (and technology in general) moves on (especially OSS), an…
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🐛Kernighan's Law
Kernighan’s Law: Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. Cliff’s Law: In three months, it will be thr…
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🧩 Composing is hard, complexity is easy
We’ve recently explored the idea that composing simple things is the way to scale. But this is harder than just cranking something out. Some examples: It is much easier to create an Excel spreadsheet than write a Python script to process a…
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🔧 How to keep a product maintainable?
How do you know if you have the ability to maintain your product? With complex systems, having all the design files and source code does not always mean a lot. Do you know how to build the source code? Do you know why the hardware is design…
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💪 Good enough is not good enough
My grandfather had this sign on his desk for years, and it embodied his philosophy for work. He did things right. He read manuals for his equipment cover to cover. He understood how things worked. And because of this, he could fix and maint…
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🔧 What makes a good Yocto BSP?
As we evaluate technology to use in our platforms, Yocto Embedded Linux BSPs often come into the mix. Recently we talked with Matt Madison, who maintains the meta-tegra BSP layer, which provides Yocto support for Nvidia’s embedded processor…
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⚠️ Hack-it, ship-it, forget-it ...
Hack-it, ship-it, forget-it … is a race to the bottom where cost is the only thing that matters. The initial delivery is what your customer gets – forever. These types of products only depreciate. And cannot be maintained. Alternatively, t…
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🏗️ Three levels of YOUR Platform
We can look at platforms at three levels. Your personal platform is the know-how that you can personally reuse from task-to-task, project-to-project, and job-to-job. But, it is not real useful outside yourself. A product platform may be wh…
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⚖️ False vs Real Platform Development
A common objection to investing in a platform is that it is “too expensive.” “We want to get it right, lock it down, and then crank out our product and make some $$$.” Many managers and owners are wary of platform development because they h…
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🏁 The long game
Platforms are long games. If you are building a one-off consumer product that will not be maintained, improved, or ever change, then you probably don’t need a platform. However, if you are building an long-lived industrial product that will…
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🔹 Simplicity
What is the role of simplicity in your platform? Simplicity makes it easier for people to use your platform. Simplicity helps ensure maintainability. Simplicity moves us toward reliable and secure platforms. Simple is not easy, actually it’…
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✨ The Beauty of Constraints
Constraints are what guide us to good solutions. Software that is simple enough that average developers can actually understand it. A user interface that is intuitive. A system we can deploy without a dedicated SRE team. Hardware created wi…