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0 pointspdimitar2y ago0 comments

> Yeah, and a lot of those jobs could have been made in a fraction of the time if the developers were not trying to use their screwdrivers as hammers

Did you deliberately ignore the part when I asked why would a team of devs learn Ansible if they don't know it? No, it's not fraction of the time at all, in fact it might balloon to weeks in the ideal bad conditions.

Most people would opt for something they already know and that's a fact of life. Learning Ansible or Fabric on-demand is not exactly an optimal expenditure of time and energy, not to mention that a proper DevOps professional would know various gotchas that a learning dev will absolutely miss. Sure the dev will EVENTUALLY get there. "Eventually" being the key word. Why risk botching stuff in the meantime?

> Because it's a fragile solution

Says you. I do Rust scripting in my Rust projects, Golang scripting in my Golang projects, and Elixir scripting in the Elixir ones. Works really well. Not necessarily for deploying and DevOps work, mind you, but for a lot of stuff like "populate me this sample data so I can experiment with the app" or "start only these parts of our app so we can do an integration test with them after" etc.

I also did part of the deployment actions, not all though, if that makes a difference. I don't know the exact situation of the person you replied to.

> You could say the same thing about Java or C++

Huge, huge disagree here, probably the biggest I ever expressed on HN. :D

So many environment variables, compiler switches, and various runtime dependencies and so many other things that it's not even worth starting, it can fill up a PhD thesis and have room for more after.

Your statement cannot be more wrong if it tried. I have several serious objections to the Golang the language that prevent me from adopting it as a main career choice -- but its portability and distribute-friendliness are one of the best in the world right now. You can criticize it for a lot but criticizing it for these two things would be severely uninformed.

> I really don't see how that one follows from the other, and I really don't understand this conflation between roles and tooling. There is a lot more to "DevOps" than packaging/distributing/deploying. It's not just because your application code is in Go that your tooling needs to be as well.

Sure there's more to DevOps, I agree, but I was under the impression that the guy you replied to was tasked with doing part of DevOps so he found a way of doing it with less friction.

Conflation between roles and tooling is unfortunate indeed and I sympathize with your statement there. It's simply an artifact of imperfect work conditions (so 99.999% of all work places).

I can relate to your frustration about non-optimal processes but you are overreacting a bit.

Can their homegrown solution backfire? Absolutely, of course it can. But often times we have to make do with what we have right now and can't optimize for the far future.

If a DevOps wants to pick up the torch and do the job properly they are free to do so but yet again, I was under the impression that the person in question was wearing several role hats at the time.

0 comments

rglullis2y ago

> "populate me this sample data so I can experiment with the app"

Which is well within the role of the developer. "Deploy to Hetzner" is not.

> I was under the impression that the person in question was wearing several role hats at the time.

Sure, I also have to do everything on my own in my own projects. But again, the function determines the tool, not the person performing the job. When I'm wearing my application developer hat, you'll see try to do as much as possible with Python, but that doesn't mean that I will try to turn every problem into a python script.

pdimitarOP2y ago

> Which is well within the role of the developer. "Deploy to Hetzner" is not.

Well, OK, I can't argue with that as much. Maybe the guy truly found it easier to do so? No clue. I know I'd definitely try with a shell script, then with the project's language, and only then with a dedicated tool. As much as I try to be a good senior backend dev -- and I know a lot of stuff and tooling that are not at all mandatory for my role -- I still can't find the time and energy to become a properly good DevOps; too much investment, and for specific cloud platforms. To this day I can't justify it and can't make myself "git gud" with AWS.

> When I'm wearing my application developer hat, you'll see try to do as much as possible with Python, but that doesn't mean that I will try to turn every problem into a python script.

No you really should not, Python is a nightmare in portability. I can trivially use venv-s and other tooling to make sure stuff is isolated and works fine but the whole house of cards is still always just one `brew upgrade` command away from falling apart. Eventually I've given up. If Python can't be trivially made portable then it's a bad tool for scripting, no matter what many people think and say (in fact, a lot of people using a tool often times speaks badly for its quality; to me "Python is good" is a mass delusion but that's a huge topic in itself that I won't tackle here). The fact that many people don't know anything else but Python is not an excuse.

Golang is a much better choice for quick scripting and that's a demonstrable fact. You can parse CLI flags and use their values and even throw some validation is some 10-15 coding lines and from then on you can use various super-useful libraries; there even exist a few that emulate a number of UNIX tools so you can still have a single binary that can do a lot without depending on anything except a kernel being present in the system (which also makes the resulting binary very convenient in constrained / container environments).

You might think I am getting hung up on details but I felt that I have to debunk the idea that Python is a good scripting tool. No it really isn't, and most Python devs never test on a random Mac or Linux machine where the dev is NOT using Python as a primary language. It's a fragile mess.

But now we're arguing in circles about familiarity. :) I recognize the irony. But for what it's worth, I didn't know Golang and made it a goal to learn it long time ago because I liked its distribution story and (mostly) ease of use (with a bunch of caveats nowadays, sadly).

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