the silver bullet syndrome by alexey vasiliev

The Silver BulletSyndrome

Alexey Vasiliev, Railsware

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Alexey Vasiliev• Web and Mobile Developer (Ruby, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, C/C++,

Golang, Elixir/Erlang), DevOps

• Open-Source libs: PGTune, SQL Joins Visualizer, RWbox, Go-Kinesis, ElixirV8,

WebP-ffi, Zopfli-ffi, MongodbLogger, SMTRails, SHTRails, ...

• Open-Source books: Cooking Infrastructure by Chef, Setting up and scaling

of PostgreSQL (Russian)

• Leading RWpod podcast about Ruby and JavaScript

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We have Agile• Stand-ups

• Sprints/Iterations

• Stories and Story Walls

• Retrospectives

• Showcases

• SCRUM

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BUT...

When it's time to deploy

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Agile is terrible. Scrum is worse.

Agile Is The New Waterfall”8

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Let's use another buzzword• Culture (TEAM have the same GOAL and AUTONOMOUS)

• Automation (CI, Continuous Deployment, Infrastructure as Code, etc)

• Measurement (performance, process and people metrics)

• Sharing (No SPECIALIST, share data, visibility)

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I love Ruby and Rails

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BUT "Rails doesn’t scale"

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Why "Rails doesn’t scale"?• Twitter was moving off of Rails in 2011

• People took the phrase and ran with it:

• sometimes to make a quick explanation about a software choice

• sometimes to sound smart

• sometimes because it fit the context in which it was said

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BUT...

Rails can scale• Scalability is an architectural concern - not confined to language or

framework

• The stateless part of project very simple to scale

• Even traditional relational databases scale

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How this myth was created?• Rails can help you to build web app very quick (15 minutes blog)

• Let's use Rails for every project!!!

• Something goes wrong :( (for Twitter use case)

• "Rails doesn’t scale"!!! (but scale for github, hulu, airbnb, etc)

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Docker for containers

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Create own PaaS with Docker

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Docker for microservices

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DockerMicroservicesRails

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Future is Bright: JavaScript everywhere

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JavaScript ecosystem

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The Birth of Universal JavaScript• Server side rendering isn't smooth

• Let's do client side

• Client side rendering is hard

• Let's create a framework

• I lost my CEO!

• Let's create another framework

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Technology Lifecycle• 10: Create new Framework

• 20: Create Conference around Framework

• 30: GOTO 10

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WhatIsHotTyping

The broken promise of static typing34

React.js is hot right now

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...the bottleneck is almost always

the DOM mutation and not JS

execution

React Doc

”

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React + Performance = ?37

React + Performance = ?38

React + Performance = ?39

Flux approach

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React isn't popular because it's

fast. It's popular because it's fun.”

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Ergonomics Vs User NeedsErgonomics

• Fun to use

• Quick to build

• Works around bugs

• Gets me paid

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User Needs

• Loads quickly

• Has smooth interactions

• Doesn't slow down my phone

• Doesn't crash

• Has features I want

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All code has a cost

All code has a costDev costs

• Learning it

• Re-learning it

• Debugging it

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User costs

• Time

• Bandwidth

• CPU/battery usage

• Frame rate

• Memory usage

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What's your point?

There is no Silver Bullet!

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Why are wedeveloping

software?

Why are we developing software?• Software isn't the goal

• Upgrades aren't the goal

• We can't always be on the latest and greatest

• Innovation and improvement are good. But what are we improving? How

does it bring value?

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How do we makechoices when

adoptingtechnology?

"Wallmart has moved to node.js"

"Twitter has moved to Scala"

Do we have same needs as Google,

Facebook, Wallmart, Twitter?

”

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Benchmarks

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Social Pressure

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Context!Like "Best Practices" need context

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Do we take into account...• Technology stability

• Is it proven technology?

• What's the learning curve

• Market share

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Frameworks: Do we take intoaccount...

• Has the framework been proved in production?

• What is the framework really capable of?

• Is the framework mature?

• Is the framework flexible or opinionated?

• Have you really played with the framework?

• Does the framework have a comprehensive set of documentation?

• Have you reviewed the community around the framework?60

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Focus on the rightthings!

<Thank You!> Questions?

Contact information

• web: leopard.in.ua

• github: le0pard

• twitter: @leopard_me

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