I want to share a couple of great pieces about modern software. Neither is exactly new, especially the first, but I’m sure some of you haven’t seen them:

• Software Disenchantment by Nikita Tonsky
• Everything in Software Is Amazing, but Nobody Is Happy by Evgeny Trifonov

What brought this to mind? Last week, I took part in a hackathon for developers at our company. I learned a lot of cool things and even shared first place with two other people who came up with very similar solutions.

(If you also work at First BIT, the results are on the portal, along with a review by another winner, Dima Leshchenko.)

Along the way, we had to deploy and configure a mountain of software: EDT, RabbitMQ, Docker, GitLab, JIRA, SonarQube, and a wagonload of smaller, simpler tools. All right, no complaints about RabbitMQ: it’s light and fast. But the rest… I already knew EDT had an appetite, but GitLab and JIRA’s hunger really surprised me.

Yes, everything ran in Docker; yes, the configuration wasn’t optimal, with several PostgreSQL servers instead of one, for example; yes, it was Docker for Windows, which every sysadmin I know loves to make jokes about. But twelve gigabytes of RAM straight out of the gate?! I won’t even mention the CPU: the load looked as if the computer were simulating a nuclear explosion in real time.

It’s hard to find a better illustration of Nikita’s points: this software devoured a sea of resources and calmly asked for more before it had even started doing anything useful. But Evgeny has a point too: with one single command, I got several operating systems up and running, complete with some pretty complicated servers. And it took a tiny fraction of the time it would have a few years ago.

I don’t have an answer. I don’t think anyone does. We’ve been having this argument forever. Pick either side, and you still end up trying to find a balance. You need to write good, fast code, while also avoiding premature optimization. Getting the code right feels great: you remember that, damn it, you’re pretty good! The second simply keeps you from losing your mind in search of the perfect bubble sort algorithm :-)