#122 Give Me Back My Monolith

Python Bytes - A podcast by Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken - Lunedì

Brian #1: Combining and separating dictionaries

    d = d1.copy()
    d.update(d2)

of note, (d1 + d2) != (d2 + d1)
Currently no subtraction equivalent
- Guido’s preference of + over |
- Related, Why operators are useful - also by Guido

Michael #2: Why I Avoid Slack

by Matthew Rocklin
I avoid interacting on Slack, especially for technical conversations around open source software.
Instead, I encourage colleagues to have technical and design conversations on GitHub, or some other system that is public, permanent, searchable, and cross-referenceable.
Slack is fun but, internal real-time chat systems are, I think, bad for productivity generally, especially for public open source software maintenance.
Prefer GitHub because I want to
- Engage collaborators that aren’t on our Slack
- Record the conversation in case participants change in the future.
- Serve the silent majority of users who search the web for answers to their questions or bugs.
- Encourage thoughtful discourse. Because GitHub is a permanent record it forces people to think more before they write.
- Cross reference issues. Slack is siloed. It doesn’t allow people to cross reference people or conversations across Slacks

by Craig Kerstiens
Feels like we’re starting to pass the peak of the hype cycle of microservices
We’ve actually seen some migrations from micro-services back to a monolith.
Here is a rundown of all the things that were simple that you now get to re-visit
Setup went from intro chem to quantum mechanics
- Onboarding a new engineering, at least for an initial environment would be done in the first day. As we ventured into micro-services onboarding time skyrocketed
So long for understanding our systems
- Back when we had monolithic apps if you had an error you had a clear stacktrace to see where it originated from and could jump right in and debug. Now we have a service that talks to another service, that queues something on a message bus, that another service processes, and then we have an error.
If we can’t debug them, maybe we can test them
All the trade-offs are for a good reason. Right?

Tim Sommer
13 “laws” of software development, including
- Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.”
- Conway’s Law: “Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.”
- The Peter Principle: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
- Ninety-ninety rule: “The first 90% of the code takes 10% of the time. The remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time”

A powerful plugin framework for converting your functions into composable, discoverable, production-ready services with minimal overhead.
Beer Garden makes it easy to turn your functions into REST interfaces that are ready for production use, in a way that’s accessible to anyone that can write a function.
Based on MongoDB, Rabbit MQ, & modern Python
Nice docker-compose option too

Extras

Michael:

Brian:

T&C 69: The Pragmatic Programmer — Andy Hunt
- not up yet, but will be before this episode is released

Jokes

From Derrick Chambers

“What do you call it when a python programmer refuses to implement custom objects? self deprivation! Sorry, that joke was really classless.”
via pyjokes: I had a problem so I thought I'd use Java. Now I have a ProblemFactory.