On-call at any size is a great primer for orgs thinking about upping their resilience and reliability game. Will Larson’s Incident response, programs, and you(r startup) is an essential companion piece.

Simon Willison pointed to this comment on the orange website last week and it struck a chord with me:

So far I also survived:

xml is the future

let’s use nosql for all the things

you must use the same language at the back and front

yes, you site must have an AMP version (ah, you forgot this one, didn’t you? It was sooo imporant, and then pouf, it was gone like tear in the rain)

you can’t code anything without async

yes, your home page must be an SPA

you can’t live without a message queue

everything must become a micro service

of course you need a container for that

of course you need a orchestrator to organize those containers

of course you need the cloud, it would be crazy to deal with those containers and orchestrators yourself

dude, why do you have a server? Use a serveless backend!

dude, why do you have a backend? Just call saas from the edge!

Every year, some generation of engineers have to learn the concepts of “there is no silver bullet”, “use the right tech for the right problem”, “your are not google”, “rewriting a codebase every 2 years is not a good business decision”, “things cost money”.