"Everything we've looked at so far is a technical problem. Compared to organizational problems, technical problems are straightforward. Distributed systems are considered hard because real systems might drop something like 0.1% of messages, corrupt an even smaller percentage of messages, and see latencies in the microsecond to millisecond range. When I talk to higher-ups and compare what they think they're saying to what my coworkers think they're saying, I find that the rate of lost messages is well over 50%, every message gets corrupted, and latency can be months or years"
I’ve enjoyed reading the comments here and I think there’s truth in how the technical problem is divided and teams are arranged. The idea of frequency of features (or builds) being a reflection of our division of the problem, is interesting. It made me think about our teams trying to ship releases and the problems arising, but zen and parallelism don’t give any hints. It’s just about effort to organise better, like it always was
The challenge for these “Zen and my job” types of work is that much of Zen practice is (deliberately) a bit of an inkblot test. If there’s any real Big Truth to it, it’s that it’s all one big muddle that everyone has to muddle through for themself. Unlike in many Western religious traditions, there is no presumption of univocality - even within the canonical literature, every opinion is understood to be the author’s alone and represents their own personal attempts at muddling things through. It’s just that some people and works are regarded as being particularly worth a read.
But that’s never explicitly stated. Which can be particularly confusing to people who grew up in religious traditions that do presume univocality and a greater degree of spiritual authority. Hence these works by people who see one particular bit that clicks for them and conclude, “Ah, this is what Zen is really about, I must go tell others!” without realizing that perhaps they just stumbled across an inkblot that they found to be particularly evocative.
In my experience with more than a couple dozen software projects, the ideal team size to successfully deliver a non-trivial effort is between five to nine people.
One subject matter expert visionary
One technical architect visionary
One or two technical masters
One or two UI/UX masters
One or two padawans capable of becoming a master
I've been on projects where everybody needs to know everything, and on projects where many groups can be insulated from others.
The more your group can work without needing a meeting with other groups, the more things can progress in parallel.
Some projects won't work well with that constraint though. And some organizations won't either.
But it's secondary.
The wall is build. If you can AI program, your problem is the build is too slow, too unreliable, not secure enough from a supply chain standpoint.
That is where one competent senior hacker tops out today. The agents are yielding to a CI that gets 35% per-vCPU occupancy.
The wall right now is skill or build, depending on your skill.
When you're dealing with multiple platforms, or hardware accelerators, or mostly all of economically relevant shit in the AI era you don't get a small, clean, fast build.
Fable can't print a Tauri faux-native app without dragging in half of LLVM.
If your build is bloated and slow, it would seem prudent to go and fix that, possibly converting a codebase from some other language or build system to something that can be built and tested very quickly. Slow builds and slow unit tests are a choice.
To people who say "You don't need scalability" I say "You also don't need unscalability..."
I like the part about synchronization and honesty. And I'm certain every time I get annoyed that someone is not as open with me as I wish they were, there is a part in there that myself contributed to that.
A good example is game theory and game semantics. The term "actor" in this context are soo abstract that we can pretty much attempt to implement them anywhere we see fit and that I think is the beauty.
She proved that he made a trip to a town where the monk lived after his return, and the library contained a copy of his reports. She could not prove more than opportunity but she strongly suspects that Hume not only read the report but may have met with the monk as well.
I'm genuinely considering that this is just a foreword and I missed the clickthrough link to the meat of the article.
The "about" section of the website is equally vacuous:
(The two M-dashes are also suspicious)It's not often I comment on blog posts, but this is honestly one of the most meaningless blogs I've ever read (not counting those fully AI-generated SEO ones). I don't get why it ended up so high on Hacker News; it has an interesting title I guess, but pretty much no substance.
The article makes a lot more sense if you've practiced Zen.
Think of it as someone's way of making sense of Zen teachings by related them to something they already understand.
It is just some daydreaming verbiage trying to connect totally disparate domains in a fanciful manner; nonsense and drivel.
As I continue reading An Introduction to Parallel Programming, I cannot help but notice a connection between communication among processors, communication among human beings, and communication within the individual self.
Whut?