I've interviewed at a few Saas startups recently:

- React / Redux / <and everything under the sun>

- NodeJS + Typescript everything or die

- GraphQL but we don't know why

- React native because we wouldn't know what native is

- Postgres with replication and fail over for 10 concurrent users

- Docker everything on AWS <every possible keywords>

- Don't forget lambdas, but batch with Kafka first

- Route 53 just cause the name is too cool not to have it

Joking about their Angular rewrite into React is a fireable offence.

See you in 2 years. /s

I mean I really get why people like using npm and Typescript is great, but the whole “web-tech got adapted for backend then adapted back to web” just makes everything so unnecessarily complicated.

I think a lot of this “using frameworks without knowing why” is just because people read articles about them and how-tos and get excited too quickly, and Google just shows way more tutorials about how to do something in React than in plain JS.

What are lambdas in this context? I thought those were just another name for closures?

AWS lambda. Functions as a service!

You forgot to mention microservices brah. If your services aren't micro enough, forget about it, you aren't gonna make it.

Microservices are dead, serverless is the future. You only pay for what you use, so when you launch and nobody cares you don't have pay anything.

I think we are "micro-serverless".

I've been there in two projects, both of which took far longer to build and neither of which ended up with anywhere near the amount of traffic or need to build things using that architecture.

That said, I had a project last year where we used a serverless platform for a product / ecommerce platform (Gatsby, Netlify, Contentful, Commercetools, JS/TS) where it worked pretty well.

yep, keep burning those cloud credits, pad-left and is-odd deserve their own microservice.

Now that I've been stuck actually working with agile in the field for 15-20 years, not sure I think we get to call that and Scrum cultish anymore. They're more just popular productivity footguns at this point.

Scrum exists to expand scrum.

The role of scrum master is about scrum indoctrination.

The authors of scrum created that role to make the methodology viral.

The methodology is also vague enough to blame you for anything that goes wrong with it.

Scrum is a way to generate progress reports and accountability.

My current employer doesn't do it (they have a 'stand up' but it's just everyone telling what they're working on while nobody listens), and I have no clue when what will be finished - and neither does management.

I mean for my current project which will probably keep me occupied until the end of the month, I got a design document with a pretty decent todo list, but someone had already Decided that it would take about 5 days.

So far they don't seem confrontational or critical about it though, so idk, I guess they're okay with it.

Documentation is not a source of truth.

Scrum reports = documentation.

Sources of truth are: the implementation, the business, customer satisfaction. And if you want to go deeper: technical debt, developer satisfaction, developer retention.

The more distracted you get with planning, the worse your product becomes and the more disempowered your developers become.

Scrum can work only if it is kept down to earth. But as soon as product managers stop meeting with developers, you have entered the path to technical bankruptcy.

Scrum is meant to promote collaboration between product manager and developers, but in most cases, product managers get away with avoiding this responsibility. And the reason is because scrum does not have provisions to keep product managers accountable...

Scrum does not define real deliverables for product managers, therefore in practice it becomes the opposite of what it promotes.

At the very least, I fully buy they created that role to create a secondary market training and certifying them.

Scrum works because Brawndo has electrolytes.

it's what plants crave!

True agile has never been tried!

agile wasn't really a process, just a manifesto. All scrum did was package itself as a marketing strategy to enterprises while the rest of the agile advocates face palmed and slowly walked backwards from "agile" as it became more and more poisoned.

Shame really, Software Philosophers like Kent Beck kind of got lost in all that noise, who always emphasized the human aspect of software creation

100% agreed. I love the agile manifesto, but the core principles got lost when most of the companies twisted it into a status and sprint scheme only.

You can get the scrum certification without having ever done anything software related in your life.

If the airplanes are VC monies, and those things do attract VC monies, can it really be described as a cargo cult if it works?

That is a funny question (in the good sense). I would argue the VCs are cargo culting themselves, but of course another could argue that once the VC money has moved into the pockets of the programmers, then the important part of the process is done.

I just doesn't necessarily create any useful software.

You pick a language because:

1) You can hire people that can use it effectively.

2) It is robust, production ready.

3) Emphasizes a set of traits that you are interested in, such as productivity, performance, high concurrency, low latency, binary size, compatibility, etc.

To the clueless this may seem like bikeshedding and cargo culting, but that is not necessarily the case.

and the last step:

- figure out something to make

(because the what always seems to come after the how)

That’s simple, it’s a blockchain federated privacy hardened pandemic resistant... thing.

You know, like Uber meets Facebook with a dash of Netflix (for that sweet, sweet ChaosOps) and a sprinkle of... thing.