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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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Have there been more reliability incidents lately?

I'm wondering if folks share this observation.

Top comments (14)

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Chris Dodds

I don't think most folks realize that even in the best of times, all of this * gestures broadly to the world at-large * , is held together by duck tape, hope, and 50+ year-old code. The older I get, the more amazed I am that anything works at all.

But yes, there's been an uptick in incidents. If you think of "the internet" as an interconnected ecosystem (which it is), stress in individual areas affects others. That's why it's really important to implement dependencies thoughtfully and consider the SRE bon mot that the network is not always reliable.

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Michiel Hendriks • Edited

I hate to break it to you. But pretty much the whole world is held together like that.

I develop software used in the logistics sector. I deal a lot with integrating our system and solution with other systems, including those of large logistics companies (warehouse operators, but also carriers like UPS, DHL,..). With all the knowledge I have gathered I'm surprised packages even get delivered, let alone in those short times. Not only are the software solutions and integrations held together with the cheapest duck tape they could find. The way a lot of physical processes, and knowledge of the people is not as good as you would expect.

Fast and cheap is generally how things are done. Not just in the development of software.

This has been documented quite a lot, but the fast and cheap is quite often slower and more expensive in the end.

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Chris Dodds

β€œ* gestures broadly to the world at-large *”

I don’t disagree.

My comment was targeted at pretty much all of human civilization. We take a broad spectrum of things for granted that would fall apart overnight if not for the constant effort of dedicated people.

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Ben Halpern

I write this as I'm unable to access GitHub.

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Filipe Herculano

hey @ben , the auth here for me is through github, since I was already logged in it kept working but on a different browser I could not log in since github was down (and I don't have twitter)

I was wondering, could DEV implement something like wordpress does with the log-in link for scenarios like those?

πŸ‘‰ wordpress.com/log-in/link

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

This week I've been doing nothing but handling high priority production issues. It's not really my job. But others couldn't handle it or figure things out.

But this does not have anything to do with the pandamic. It's just the technical debt, poor craftsmanship, and tardiness in software maintenance which is catching up.

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HS • Edited

So I started experiencing bugs since 2019 November I think. Azure being too hard to use in terms of "slow and buggy". My ISP didn't work properly up to that point. Bought S10+ before that but had issues with fingerprint. Then Viber gets my phone to vibrate without any notification or possibility to answer. Then company email is delaying mails about 1 full day. Windows had trilion bugs with loosing files and unable to shout down properly so I had to pull the plugs on work laptops. IntelliJ blocks all the time, code suggestions freez the app for like 30s, gradle refuses to refresh dependencies after build gradle changed had to manually clear cache for everything and deployment files. Facebook imposible use at some points. GitHub last night supper slow but I had access all the time. Online order from pharmacy totaly screwed by them didn't want to fix it until I sent couple of emails including their CEO. My wife tells me I'm boring her with my complaints...

I don't know is it software, or because these companies always had bad reputation, or is it people or corona.

P.S. forgot to mention that I cant find anything anymore google or others before September 2019. Whatever I type finds exactly things I want to avoid and find the contrary. Or it just shows billion unrelated similarities

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Filipe Herculano

I also noticed an increase latency in cloudflare's DNS (developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/)

Some days got to the point that I had to disable it in order to get internet

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Dan Fockler

I think a lot more of the infrastructure on the web is held together by a few integral people in companies than we would realize. We're going through a very stressful time and things start to slip a little when you are low on sleep or focus, or highly stressed.

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Andrew Brown πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦

Time to move to AWS Code Commit lol

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leob

No that's also "cloud" ... host it in your own old-fashioned hot and dusty server room!

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Andrew Brown πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦

Only if you can afford the roof-top generator. πŸ™ƒ

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leob

Yes or a solar panel, and if the sun don't shine then you'll have to cycle (man-powered generator) ... OTOH word has that oil goes for a price below zero nowadays (negative!) so you get your oil, plus money for free to buy your generator :-)

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leob

Didn't notice this myself (not even anecdotically), but it might be related to Covid-19 with a lot more people working remote?