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Title: Kill It With Fire Authors: Marianne Bellotti Category:#books Number of Highlights: 23 Date: 2024-02-06 Last Highlighted: 2023-12-09
Highlights
Restoring legacy systems to operational excellence is ultimately about resuscitating an iterative development process so that the systems are being maintained and evolving as time goes on. (351)
Tags:#development,#technology
To understand legacy systems, you have to be able to define how the original requirements were determined. You have to excavate an entire thought process and figure out what the trade-offs look like now that the options are different. (359)
Tags:#work,#legacy,#technology
These old programs are perhaps less efficient than they were before, but technology that isn’t used doesn’t survive decades. (363)
Tags:#legacy,#technology
It is easy to build things, but it is difficult to rethink them once they are in place. (381)
Tags:#creativity,#technology
In technology, “good enough” reigns supreme. (389)
Tags:#favorite,#technology
The first mistake software engineers make with legacy modernization is assuming technical advancement is linear. (454)
Tags:#technology
In other words, the arms race around data centers left smaller organizations behind and created a demand for the commercial cloud. Optimizing the cloud for customization and control created the market for managed platforms and eventually serverless computing. The serverless model will feed its consumers more and more development along its most appealing features until the edge cases where serverless approaches don’t quite fit start to find common ground among each other. Then a new product will come out that will address those needs. (463)
Note: This is spot on with the return of monoliths.
Tags:#legacy,#technology
Alignable differences are those for which the consumer has a reference point. For example, this car is faster than that car, or this phone has a better camera than that phone. Nonalignable differences are characteristics that are wholly unique and innovative; there are no reference points with which to compare. … For a nonalignable difference to make an impact, the estimated value it produces has to be greater than all the alignable differences and all the other nonalignable differences put together. (471)
Tags:#negotiation,#technology
As a company iterates to improve a certain characteristic of the product, it ultimately makes the product less desirable for the group of existing customers. Companies do this with the hope that a larger group of new customers will make that loss irrelevant. (484)
Note: This feels painfully relevent after some recent conversations.
Tags:#work,#technology
Adopting new practices doesn’t necessarily make technology better, but doing so almost always makes technology more complicated, and more complicated technology is hard to maintain and ultimately more prone to failure. (640)
Tags:#legacy,#work,#technology
Truly new systems often cannibalize the interfaces of older systems to create alignable differences. (762)
Tags:#design,#technology
Just as programmers are now writing lines of code that would fit on a punch card, they also use operating systems whose interfaces were designed to best fit teletype keyboards. Leveraging familiar constructs to boost adoption can create strange traditions. (867)
Tags:#design,#adoption,#technology
The lesson to learn here is the systems that feel familiar to people always provide more value than the systems that have structural elegances but run contrary to expectations. (935)
Tags:#legacy,#design,#technology
Engineers tend to overestimate the value of order and neatness. The only thing that really matters with a computer system is its effectiveness at performing its practical application. (948)
Tags:#technology
Artificial consistency means restricting design patterns and solutions to a small pool that can be standardized and repeated throughout the entire architecture in a way that does not provide technical value. (999)
Tags:#design,#technology
Modernizations should be based on adding value, not chasing new technology. (1075)
Tags:#technology
People gain awareness of interfaces and technology through their networks, not necessarily by popularity. (1076)
Tags:#technology
Familiar interfaces help speed up adoption. (1076)
Tags:#technology
This book will repeat the message of trade-offs over and over again. No changes made to existing systems are free. Changes that improve one characteristic of a system often make something else harder. Teams that are good at legacy modernization know how to identify the trade-offs and negotiate the best possible deal. You have to pick a goal or a characteristic to optimize on and set budgets for all other characteristics so you know how much you’re willing to give up before you start losing value. (1151)
Tags:#legacy,#technology
When both observability and testing are lacking on your legacy system, observability comes first. Tests tell you only what won’t fail; monitoring tells you what is failing. Our new engineer had the freedom to alter huge swaths of the system because the work the team had done rolling out better monitoring meant when her changes were deployed, we could spot problems quickly. (1311)
Tags:#testing,#o11y,#legacy,#technology
In psychology, people call it a self-serving bias. When things go well, we overestimate the roles of skill and ability and underestimate the role of luck. When things go poorly, on the other hand, it’s all bad luck or external forces. (1419)
Overgrowth is a particular type of coupling between the software and the layers of abstraction making up the platform on which it runs. The perils of dependency management are well known, but with legacy systems, dependency management is about more than just what a package manager might install. The older a system is, the more likely the platform on which it runs is itself a dependency. Most modernization projects do not think about the platform this way and, therefore, leave the issue as an unpleasant surprise to be discovered later. (1485)
Tags:#management,#legacy,#technology
Individual contributors often find the barrier to following that advice is not convincing themselves, but convincing others. Particularly when the organization is big, the pressure to run projects the same way everyone else does, so that they look correct even at the expense of being successful, is significant. (1619)
Note: This hits close to home with ny recent chef work.
Tags:#teamwork,#technology