My TL;DR style notes from articles I read today.

Lessons from Building Observability Tools at Netflix

• Persistent log storage doesn’t scale. Work on an architecture that lets users stream logs into memory & keep the ones that match their criteria.
• In a microservcie architecture, knowing what decisions microservices are making & how those correlate is critical. Users need this additional context to find the root cause of issues that involve multiple systems.
• Defining actionable alerting, beyond just threshold alerting, is key to system success at scale.

Full post here, 9 mins read

Systems thinking as important as ever for new coders

“Drive a Honda or a Jeep, you'll still need to replace your tires and think about the road you're driving on, on the way to the grocery store.”

Understand how a system works, what are its constituents, how these constituents operate individually and how they interact with other components within your system's context. Know how these components behave when they share, send or request information from other components of the same or a different system. Build a solid understanding of the basics. You can learn any syntax later. That’s the easy part.

Full post here, 4 mins read

The (not so) hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android

Dropbox team discovered that writing code once sounds great in theory but over time it leads to overheads that end up being more expensive than just writing the code twice. Overheads of:

• custom frameworks and libraries
• custom development environment
• addressing differences between the platforms
• training, hiring, and retaining developers

Full post here, 7 mins read

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