Unironically, this is one of the simpler setups for a multi-node WP setup I have seen, and I have set up prod WP many times. Anyone with associate level knowledge of AWS can do this. There is a reason there are entire companies (pantheon) dedicated to hosting Wordpress for you: doing it with speed, resiliency and redundancy is hard.
I recently purchased a new 13" pro, upgraded to the top processor. I installed Bootcamp and played hours of The Witcher 3 (on low settings, of course, but still). There were no overheating issues. Fan was going full blast the whole time, but it kept up just fine. Hopefully my little anecdote instills a little confidence. The new 13" is as close to a perfect machine to me as I have ever owned. It's compact, portable, light but a completely full powered functional 100% dev workhorse (with a great keyboard AND a physical escape key to boot). I couldn't be happier. Kudos to Apple for this one.
Just a word of caution as someone who has went from D.C. to small town: It can also be not so good if you come with your previous political beliefs. Big coastal city politics are _very_ unpopular in smaller towns (not here to discuss the merits, just stating the reality). You won't make very many friends. Smaller towns don't have the same issues big cities do, so naturally it will require a different approach and way of thinking.
Well, no one would actually lead with that, but I've met people in the Bay that have lead with "What are your pronouns?" and "How do you identify?", either of which may make for an awkward (or worse) first impression in a lot of other places.
Are you sure you have lived in the country? It doesn't make you a pariah, it makes you the target of lots of pamphlets to come to their Church. There are plenty of people who don't go to Church in the country.
And get this, there's bars too!!! With real alcohol!
For people who don't live or haven't been to the bay area recently: Nobody does the 'what are you pronouns?' as a party icebreaker in the average bay area population. The people who do travel in very, very specific social circles.
Agreed. I've seen this in the US and Canada, but in places that were 1) very bourgeoisie, very white, and pseudo-leftist, and 2) near a university of some sort.
Not a thing in the rest of the country, or even in very leftest areas.
I have been to the Bay Area (10 years ago) and didn't have this problem, but going there soon, can I just say 'A copper pipe' or whatnot or that will hurt their sensitive souls?
FFS, just ask who they are, what they like to do and see if there is something in common. This politica bullshit really need to end (it is ok for more close relationships, but if the first question I get is if I am Right or Left, I will just insult he person somehow)
I’ve never heard anyone say they love abortion. They love the ability for women to have the freedom to choose abortion, and what they want to do with their body. I also prefer “anti choice” for those who oppose others having that freedom.
That's an important thing to understand and really internalize.
What makes sense in a city context doesn't always make sense in a town context. And what makes sense in a town doesn't always make sense in a city. The difference is huge, to the point that the best approach can be the opposite.
I think this is at the crux of a lot of the country's polarization and inability to understand the other side.
Politics in general is less of a thing in smaller towns. My voting precinct (not even a small town, the suburbs of Annapolis) is roughly 2/3 Trump, 1/3 Clinton. I have no idea who is who, and it’s never come up.
Everyone thinks you live in a small town if you move to the Midwest. I moved to Des Moines and my aunt was talking about how her grandma knew everyone in her town like I could relate to it. The Des Moines metro area has a population of 650k people. And half of those people have trump derangement syndrome just as badly as rich coastal people.
I am not sure why people think Amazon is such a dominate force on the commerce front, especially with respects to Walarmt. It isn't even close between the two. I am more worried about the cloud technology space being down to basically two choices now.
Amazon.ca and Amazon.com accounted for about 10% of all e-commerce sales in Canada for 2019.
I wish i had some stats for the raw # of total packages/shipments, because that's where I think Amazon's marketshare would match the picture of "50% of every package"
Link I found for 2018 e-commerce net sales in Canada [0] has amazon and amazon.ca combined for 4.7b, costco at 1b, walmart 0.9, apple 0.79, the bay 0.47 etc.
So amazon eclipses the other other 7 competitors all on its own.
In Canada, yes - but only because of our awful CBSA, the absurdly low de minimus exception in NAFTA, and the fact that the Canadian retail sector is fat and uncompetitive (and yet Shopify is Canadian??!)
Amazon is the only online retailer that’s figured out shipping and the CBSA here. Everyone else is awful. Walmart online ordering is awful. Home Depot is awful. What’s left of toys r us is awful. Canadian Tire online is so witheringly, eye-watering awful that it turned me off of even going to the store.
Walmart, Costco, The Bay all did more than a billion in revenue for 2019. Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Best Buy, Home Depot had more than 500 million and less than a billion.
They wouldn't be doing these numbers if the state of e-commerce was as "eye-watering awful" as you make it out to be.
These numbers are for the Canadian market which ended with about 40 billion in total "e-commerce" sales for 2019.
Online? Those are all great retailers in-store. But online? That’s their online revenue? I doubt it.
Home Depot advertises 2 day shipping but then waits a week before actually starting the clock on their shipping. At least here in Canada. Walmart is the same.
Let me tell you about ordering from Canadian tire online. I did this once. I chose in-store pickup. When I got to the service desk (which actually had an “online pickup” sign on it), and asked for my order, the staff looked at me like I was from Mars. And this was a showcase-store on Grandview here in Vancouver - not some backwater CDN tire off in Moose Jaw. Then they discovered that actually, they don’t have that item. The website said my order was ready to pick up, but they didn’t have it set aside and they didn’t even stock it and had no idea how this “online pickup” worked. So I asked for a refund. And they couldn’t do it! It’s a separate company and they didn’t even have my order in their system to be able to refund me! I asked them what I was supposed to do at that point, and the store manager (of the largest CDN tire store in vancouver) actually advised me to dispute the charge on my credit card and get the charge reversed!
Yes, that was their online sales revenue in 2019, unless you think giants like Wal Mart (with nearly 400 supercenter stores in Canada) and Costco are doing only 1 billion in brick and mortar sales.
These numbers are readily available in their financial statements (Wal Mart doesn't separate out Wal Mart Canada's numbers - I happen to be in the industry.
Your Canadian Tire anecdote sounds unbelievable unless it was many years ago.
Canadian Tire is one of the few Canadian stores in 2020 where can check store stock/inventory online down to the aisle of the store. They had already started implementing pickup lockers in their store before covid.
I've placed a few online orders with them and have never had any issues (including in store pickup).
FYI, they did close to $600 million in e-commerce sales in 2019.
Walmart, Loblaws, etc process same day grocery pickup online (and they did this before the pandemic).
The Canadian e-commerce experience is not some backwater that you proclaim it to be.
These numbers are readily available in their financial statements (Wal Mart doesn't separate out Wal Mart Canada's numbers - I happen to be in the industry.
That’s kind of my whole point - Canada is different. I read all sorts of accounts from Americans about how e-commerce and online retail in the US has matured and you can reliably order goods from lots of big retailers online and expect to get your goods on a predictable date. And that just hasn’t happened in Canada yet. Online retail here is still comprehensively awful. Amazon is the only online option that delivers predictably and on time.
Just within the last two years I’ve ordered from both Walmart and Home Depot and both of them have sat on my order for 2 weeks before actually shipping it. I’ve had Home Depots delivery courier actually throw a box of light bulbs across my yard onto my concrete steps. And yes, that CDN tire incident was about 2 years ago. IKEA wants $20 shipping to send me a box of screws. The only bright spot in any of this is grocery delivery as you point out. But even then, Save-on’s payment processor has glitched my orders on two occasions.
The Canadian e-commerce experience is not some backwater that you proclaim it to be.
It’s still about 10 years behind the US. I still see too many retailers who are basically charging what their US equivalents are + the shipping cost difference to traverse the CBSA moat. The big retailers here can’t get it together and the small retailers are still just arbitraging Canada’s weird retail import tariffs. Super high shipping costs, bungled and lost orders, and unpredictable and late delivery is still the norm outside Amazon, or at least it was in 2019. Hard to say now with c19.
I tried to use Canadian tire for I store pickup and it was the most awful thing - “ready next day” and after 5 days I had to go into a store to cancel my order, then order it on amazon for 5% more and it arrived the next day < 24 hours later. I will never attempt it again.
Only anecdotal but Amazon has to deliver most goods, Walmart and other physical retailers can provide pickup services for online purchases (which I prefer for some goods).
Most of my packages from Amazon will have just one item in it but when I go to a store, like walmart, I will more often than not have a cart of multiple items I am buying.
I am not saying I represent everyone, but rather, it is hard to compare the two without knowing more data.
IIRC, Amazon's total revenue is less than 300 billion while Walmarts is over 500 billion.
During the height of the pandemic Amazon's performance suffered for us. Prior to the pandemic 100% of our online purchases came from Amazon mostly due to inertia. Find something, order it, it shows up.
Amazon faltered. Lots of things out of stock, delayed delivery, missing items in shipments. We then turned to ebay and shopify and experienced none of those things. The spending is probably now 50% ebay, 30% amazon and 20% shopify now.
The decentralization approach to ecommerce is really coming through now ... at least for us.
I was surprised what a great experience it was buying from ebay and shopify. I hope they don't work to centralize things in the future.
You're right that Walmart is massive but Amazon is the biggest ecommerce player in the US and it's not even close. 38% Amazon to next closest Walmart at 5.8% [1]. Pre-COVID Amazon was about 44%.
Or quality, or getting what you actually paid for, or not supporting a wanna-be trillionare technocrat that would rather satisfy his fantasy to colonize mars than treat his warehouse workers humanely or help his neighbors here on earth in general.
Efficient for what? What are we solving for? Rushing out buggy, complex, unmaintainable, undocumented software? Sure. We are certainly more efficient at that. Hardly anyone takes the time to understand anything anymore, thoroughly, and detail it for others. It feels like all surface-level stuff.
>Hardly anyone takes the time to understand anything anymore, thoroughly, and detail it for others. It feels like all surface-level stuff.
It's a pity that this point will be lost to downvotes.
There is a common problem when the work of people that put the time in to really understand, test, improve and document the things we rely upon is undervalued and when that which is rewarded is superficial understanding and gluing together things that barely work is prioritized.
Yes, iterating quickly is important. Yes, it's also important not to waste time making something more robust than it needs to be. I'm not disputing that, what I AM saying is that as things scale up and hundreds of users turn into hundreds of millions of users, it's extremely important to have a culture of rewarding the people that take the time to make these systems robust and continue to ensure they perform well.
As a small anecdote, this was really driven home by a one-on-one meeting I had with an old manager: I'd started working at a small startup which almost completely lacked any kind of documentation and almost everything needed to be figured out by trial and error or (equally common) by pestering the couple of people who had things like passwords and keys and admin access to do things necessary to let a new developer begin development work.
Realizing this was going to be a giant pain in the ass as we scaled, I took the time to write a ton of documentation, checklists, scripts and onboarding docs so that new developers could get up to speed quickly. I then trained the new devs as they came onboard to ensure they got up and running as fast as possible.
Back to the one-on-one: I ended up getting told that my performance was a concern because, unlike myself, the new developers had managed to get up to speed and become productive very quickly and it reflected poorly on me that I had taken so long.
Since then, I've taken a lot more care to assess the culture of a company before doing what I consider to be "the right thing" and do deeper-level work.
I meant in terms of documentation, i.e. stack overflow, youtube, etc. Universities are putting their course materials online for free, that sort of thing.
It's easy to be cynical about modern software, but remember it can still be sold and the economic benefit of being able to quickly throw together something that looks like a finished product to test an idea is hard to quantify.
I developed a product like what you described and started a company using nothing but my laptop and an AWS account. To make the same product in 1997 would be difficult if not impossible without very deep pockets.
> To make the same product in 1997 would be difficult if not impossible without very deep pockets.
And likely 10-100x the quality and reliability, and without needing to sell every bit of your personal information. Has anyone stopped to ask, maybe we just don't need all of this software?
Yes I think this person is taking the very best of 90s software and contrasting it with the very worst of the current time. People still do high quality work today.
We are certainly more efficient at that. Hardly anyone takes the time to understand anything anymore, thoroughly, and detail it for others. It feels like all surface-level stuff
I sometimes feel like every project is either learning a new thing as you go (for no other reason than that it’s new and cool) or maintaining some written be someone who was learning as they went (because now that bug ridden pile of crap is running in production).
Generics, I would certainly be ecstatic for if it was done in a way that is novel and feels Go-like, so not Java or C# or C++'s implementations. This has certainly been the stance of the Go team since the beginning of time. It has never been "anti-generics" it's always been "we've studied all the generics implementations out there, and didn't feel like any one of them were good enough, so rather than shoehorn them in, we are being patient." This approach needs to be celebrated more.
Exceptions, OTOH, I hope never see the light of day in Go. Curse them.
What's wrong with the way that Java, C# a, and C++ handle generics? I see this complaint fairly regularly, but I was never sure why. Is it how the compiler handles it, or how the language defines it that is the reason for this dislike? Genuine curiosity.
This is the lazy answer I know, but I wanted to at least answer your genuine curiosity: There is ample research available online on the subject that explains it in depth and far better than I ever could. However, I will leave you with a few quotes that help at least paint the picture.
From the Golang FAQ:
> Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time. We haven’t yet found a design that gives value proportionate to the complexity
Quote from Russ Cox:
> The generic dilemma is this: do you want slow programmers, slow compilers and bloated binaries, or slow execution times?
Finally, one of the reasons the C++ or Java approach has never been palatable to Go core devs is summarized from this Rob Pike quote from his famous "Less is Exponentially More" blog post:
> If C++ and Java are about type hierarchies and the taxonomy of types, Go is about composition
So therefore it really is also a matter of finding a generics approach that lives up to that spirit as well. Contracts I think are approaching that.
All that said, user defined generics (since technically speaking, Go has many generic capabilities today already) are coming to Go, they just aren't being rushed. I think we will be happy with the generics implementation in Go within the next year.
Dismissing this as some petty doom-to-fail attempt to fulfill some narcissistic desire would be foolish, as recent presidential history, from GW and especially through Obama has shown us the levels we have allowed executive overreach to rise. Obama designed the blueprint for achieving things without Congressional approval.
Does anyone else find the costs associated with running well-tested, well developed systems overblown? Like if you know how to adjust some basic parameters, you will solve for 99% use cases (adjust memory, adjust ram).
Examples I can think of is Rabbit MQ and Cassandra. But in general, we have some really battle-tested software these days that has become simpler to configure and run over time. People seem scared to run their own these days.
I vouched for this comment because it’s a valid point and I’m not sure why it was killed.
I happen to disagree strongly, though: lots of engineers in my experience undervalue the work of systems administrators and underestimate the effort needed to operationalize any technology.
Running your own is absolutely fine if you are willing to keep your stack small and invest time learning the tools you pick. But there are still horror stories of people thinking snapshots are backups, turning the wrong knobs and turning off fsync on their databases, ...
Yea exactly and unless you are FB scale you can just run a single docker container and never really have to worry (granted you know how to use Docker).
Most small startups are actually the ones who don’t really need SaaS services.
>Yea exactly and unless you are FB scale you can just run a single docker container and never really have to worry
This has not been the case at multiple employers and or consulting clients.
If you're providing software to an enterprise this almost will never fly. That single docker container will have an outage when basically anything happens. The container dies, systemd fails to restart, node dies, network switch dies, data center has basically any major issue, etc.
I think your comment brings value just probably biased with your own experience of running a consumer to consumer startup.
I think you're misinterpreting my comment. I meant specifically for most small time startups, not necessarily small time startups deploying enterprise apps. If you're deploying enterprise apps then by definition you're for all intents and purposes "fb scale."
A lot of SaaS promise infinite scalability—a need which often never comes to most small time startups.
But developers are part of this problem too. There's plenty of times where I see devs immediately reach for tools instead of learning just a little bit more about what they already have. My favorite example is when folks want to add a NoSQL db into the mix on top of a traditional db. Not because there's a real performance need, but because for their use case it is 'easier'. Never mind that their problem possibly could have been solved by just writing their own SQL instead of trusting a garbage ORM...
