Too Big, Too Small, Just Right

What if...? CrowdStrike

Hi,

What if…? I must have read this sentence hundreds of times in the last few days regarding the CrowdStrike outage. Everywhere, people are looking for someone to blame. And that is wrong!

We are witnessing the classic blame game. It is more important to find someone to blame than to solve the problem. This only fosters fear.

An employee of Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, once made a mistake that cost the company ten million dollars. When the man was called into Watson’s office, he was sure he would be fired. To his surprise, his boss said: “Fire you? Not after I just invested ten million dollars in your education.” ~ The Winners Laws by Bodo Schäfer (translated from German edition)

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Marcus Held

HashMap

Hi,

HashMap? How can HashMap be a topic for the newsletter? Hold on!

The topic came to mind because I was in an interview for a client yesterday and spent quite a long time discussing the HashMap. The experience was a bit of déjà-vu. 2-3 years ago, I was heavily involved in recruiting. During that time, I conducted over 150 technical interviews. And from that period, I learned a lot about our industry. First and foremost, we lack seniority and fail to sufficiently develop young developers.

Marcus Held

Surprising Architecture

Hi,

“RCoffee [an internal tool for content production] accesses the test servers via SSH and displays the Tomcat logs”

Wow. That was surprising.

I have been working with this client for a year now.

The application is the market leader in its field, and the current version was developed over 10 years ago.

A lot has accumulated, of course. And when I am hired, the technical debt is usually very large.

Marcus Held

Too Big, Too Small, Just Right

Hi,

An old developer joke:

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. – Leon Bambrick

Or another version:

There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: 2. Exactly-once delivery 1. Guaranteed order of messages 2. Exactly-once delivery – Mathias Verraes

And there are many more:

There are so many variations on the “there are only two hard problems in computer programming…” joke that I’m starting to suspect that programming isn’t actually very easy. – Nat Pryce

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Marcus Held

Customer Support

Hi,

When “the customer” calls, very different things happen in various companies

You probably know this from your everyday life. You have a question about your mobile contract. So, you call the hotline. A computer answers. You press 1… then 3… then refuse to have the call recorded for training purposes, and finally, you end up with some employee in a call center. You explain your problem. The employee has a script in front of them and goes through it with you from top to bottom. If they’re good, you don’t even notice it.

Marcus Held