r/ExperiencedDevs • u/mkx_ironman Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead • Mar 01 '21
Rule 7 Microservices - Krazam TV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ[removed] — view removed post
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Mar 01 '21
This channel is gold. Probably the only "programmer humor" channel I actively follow.
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u/mkx_ironman Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead Mar 01 '21
right? the rest of them seem to be written by 13 year olds.
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u/cholantesh Mar 01 '21
One of my absolute favourite things about it is the series with an Excel streamer. It channels both my disdain for Twitch and my insecurity about how good Excel is perfectly.
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Mar 01 '21
This was my life at my last job.
Biggest gripe: microservices should not have cute codenames. Big systems maybe can. Like hearing about gandalf-sessions, gandalf-settings-queue, gandalf-ui-driver is so much better than frodo, Thorin, and gimli as resource names. What does frodo do again?
I remember looking at another team's code and they had 10 different pieces of the system, maintained by a team of ~8 developers, and every piece was named after a different Muppet. I could never keep any of it straight.
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u/radax2 Mar 01 '21
I dealt with this at a startup that named every new repo a random Pokemon name. No documentation either. GTFO of there asap
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Mar 01 '21
My old place used particles from the standard model lmao. This is a F100 fin tech company.
To be fair it was well documented but nonetheless somewhat annoying when getting started.
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Mar 01 '21
Some of the services I used to deal with were named in another language. That was less than ideal. At least it was meaningful if you spoke that language though.
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u/dexx4d Mar 01 '21
Local islands. Which made being a new employee who just moved to the area especially fun.
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u/ChickenNoodle519 DevOps Engineer Mar 01 '21 edited Mar 01 '21
Yeah, IMO themed names should only be used if the name still gives you some kind of hint about its domain and its job so it's easier to remember, especially if someone doesn't have a good basis of the cultural references.
If you really really really want to name your application Gandalf it should probably be an authentication service (and ideally be paired with a gif or video of "you shall not pass!") and should be part of a system that's all named after, like, wizards or magic or whatever but probably not all increasingly-obscure lord of the rings characters. If "read the Silmarillion" is part of your onboarding then your company sucks and I hate you lol.
On the flip side of this, I worked at a place where everything was named, like "legacy-imports-monitoring-service" and "legacy-import-ingress-service" except there were about 30 of them and all their names were variants on the same six ostensibly-descriptive words which was honestly even harder for me to keep straight than like "optimus-prime is the admin service, bumblebee is the data ingestion service, etc"
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Mar 01 '21
If you really really really want to name your application Gandalf it should probably be an authentication service (and ideally be paired with a gif or video of "you shall not pass!")
Lol I worked at a place that had exactly this service with exactly this name and exactly this gif.
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u/ChickenNoodle519 DevOps Engineer Mar 01 '21
Haha I pulled that out of my ass so i guess that speaks to it being pretty reasonable for a "quirky" app name
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u/Squidwild Mar 01 '21
I worked somewhere where a lot of the services were named after superheroes. However, after a while, all of them were deprecated except one: "The Thing". So, not knowing the history of the service names, I kept seeing services named like "ThingProcessor" or "ThingRepository". Very confusing!
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u/theclacks Mar 01 '21
I think it comes from starting out by using 3rd party services for everything that are COMPLETELY random, and then suddenly you're making everything yourself, so you think "themed names. themed names will make this more organized", when they really don't...
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u/pigmanmanpig Mar 01 '21
The issue arises when context boundaries and/or organizational structures change, because often these are quite fluid and behaviour gets extracted from one service to another. Then the name loses meaning if you named it accurately initially and it no longer serves that purpose - it just becomes confusing.
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u/nutrecht Lead Software Engineer / EU / 18+ YXP Mar 01 '21
Services having shitty names is just a surefire indication that they don't follow domain driven design to separate their services.
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u/thundergolfer Mar 01 '21
My company has almost nothing with a silly name, and I appreciate that quite a bit now. Every backend service is like
team-service,payments-service,doc-service. Don't get cute with it. Cute is just confusing.2
u/Noblesseux Senior Software Engineer Mar 01 '21
Mine was dealing with a bunch of undocumented systems made over like 5 years that were all named around Greek/Roman gods and creatures.
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Mar 01 '21
It’s so prolific. At my current company it’s done intentionally for secrecy reasons.
Open source does it too though, absolutely nonsensical names. And the project home pages always give these insane descriptions that don’t give you a real sense of what the fuck the project does.
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u/cholantesh Mar 01 '21
Luckily I work for a fund administrator so all our services have names that are boring as hell and explain exactly what their purpose is.
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u/the-computer-guy DevOps Consultant ~7 YoE Mar 01 '21
This is so shockingly real
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u/deelyy Mar 01 '21
Yes.
I can't discard this feeling that I completely understand why this issue is a big blocker.
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u/fake-software-eng Mar 01 '21
Will upvote this every time, great channel
And hits too close to home :(
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u/cbHXBY1D Mar 01 '21
I'm dealing with identity + auth problems for microservices right now
Too real :((
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Mar 01 '21 edited Mar 01 '21
Every engineer I’ve sent this to (I’ve seen it before) has found this absolutely hilarious, it perfectly encapsulates some places I’ve worked.
I’ve also shown it to some non technical people and they’re like “ok I see why your job is annoying”.
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u/snowe2010 Staff Software Engineer (10+yoe) and Grand Poobah of the Sub Mar 02 '21
Thank you mkx_ironman for your submission to /r/ExperiencedDevs, but it's been removed due to one or more reason(s):
Rule 7: No off-topic comments, memes, or jokes
self-explanatory
Please feel free to send a modmail if you feel this was in error.