Kodsnack 346 - A golden age of exploration and tomfoolery, with Tomer Gabel

Recorded at Øredev 2019, Fredrik talks to Tomer Gabel. We start from Tomer’s talk about microservices, why the timing was right to do a microservices talk in the form of a retrospective, what is happening now, and how the answer to the question of whether you should go microservices has changed in the last few years. Tomer discusses how problems and solutions evolve, are commoditized and sometimes almost disappear as a concept (or gain new terminology to describe them). In the future, we might not be talking or thinking about microservices at all, but the concept may have evolved and adapted and actually form a basis for everything we do - technology becoming so central that we don’t even need to think about it anymore.

Also: it may not be worth it to migrate everything into the future. Common sense and judgement required, as always.

We discuss how many of the peculiarities of the software development industry may simply be because the industry is so young. Tomer thinks we as an industry will eventually figure things out and become a lot more settled down, and less exciting if you will. We should all be excited about being around in the industry right now, when there is so much freedom and so many things to do and try.

Is the software industry somewhat unique in being so much about sharing knowledge? And are we making the most out of our golden age?

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• Tomer Gabel on Twitter and on the web
• Wework
• Wix
• Commodore 64[* Commodore 64
• Tomer’s retrospective on microservices talk
• Microservices
• Amazon lambda
• CAP tradeoffs
• CRDT - Conflict-free replicated data type
• Dosbox
• Fredrik’s chat with IKEA (in Swedish)
• Kevlin Henney
• The episode about software for airplanes (in Swedish)
• TLA+ - a formal verification language
• Whitepaper on TLA+ usage at Amazon
• Dynamo
• Proof of verification
• Uncle Bob

• I think I just got the timing right
• Everyone’s kind of doing it
• I’m totally an apostate
• It’s worth wondering why
• Should you go microservices
• Computation substrate
• Lambdas were unimaginable ten years ago
• The industry is so new
• Software is the only industry in which the word “legacy” has a negative connotation
• We’re a very new industry
• We don’t really understand how to do what we do
• Completely different and a lot more boring
• I hope I don’t live to see that
• The next thing no-one knows how to build
• Software is starting to matter
• When you consume a service
• At some point the demand for software won’t be as extreme
• Why we get to have fun
• The golden age of software engineering
• A golden age of exploration and tomfoolery
• We’re young, we’re happy, we get to play with toys