Want to change the world? Don’t bother volunteering—get a real, ‘boring’ job.
If you’re volunteering at shelters or working for most nonprofits, that’s all very nice, but it’s one-off. You’re one of the privileged few who have the education to create lasting change. It may feel good to ladle soup to the hungry, but you’re wasting valuable brain waves that could be spent ushering in a future in which no one is hungry to begin with.
There’s a word that was probably never mentioned by your professors: Scale. No, not the stuff on the bottom of your bong or bathtub. It’s the concept of taking a small idea and finding ways to implement it for thousands, or millions, or even billions. Without scale, ideas are no more than hot air. Stop doing the one-off two-step. It’s time to scale up.\
Don’t spend all your time caring for the sick. Prevent disease. Gene therapy, early detection and immunotherapy can change the trajectory of disease because they scale. Don’t build temporary shelters. Figure out how to 3-D print real homes quickly and cheaply. Why tutor a few students when you can capture lessons from best-of-breed teachers and deliver them electronically to millions? That’s scale.
.. There is too much talk of sustainability, the fight over slices of a pie, zero-sum games. That’s the wrong framework. You need sustainability only if you stick to one-off moves.
.. detoxifying oppression
.. Channel that energy to change the stagnant status quo through scale in education, banking and especially government.
.. listen to Bono. As he told Georgetown students a few years ago, “Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.”
Fauna DB: Global Transactional NoSQL
Productivity, safety, and operational simplicity in a unified distributed database.
From the team that scaled Twitter.
Serverless is eating the stack and people are freaking out — as they should be
AWS Lambda has stamped a big DEPRECATED on containers
When AWS releases their own tooling, it always seems to start out pretty bad, so the temptation is to fill in those gaps with your own tool.
But AWS services change and get better at a very rapid rate. So I think the lesson I learned is lean on AWS as much as possible, or build on top of their foundation and make it pluggable in a way that you can just revert to the AWS tooling when it gets better.
.. As I talk to developers and sysadmins, I feel like I encounter a lot of rage about serverless as a concept. People always want to tell me the three reasons why it would never work for them. Why do you think this concept inspires so much animosity and how do you try to change hearts and minds on this?
A big part of it is that we are deprecating so many things at one time. It does feel like a very big step to me compared to something like containers. Kelsey Hightower said something like this at one point: containers enable you to take the existing paradigm and move it forward, whereas serverless is an entirely new paradigm.
.. And so all these things that people have invented and invested time and money and resources in are just going away, and that’s traumatic, that’s painful. It won’t happen overnight, but anytime you make something that makes people feel like what they’ve maybe spent the last 10 years doing is obsolete, it’s hard.
.. the first time we launched a serverless service, we brought down all of our Redis instances — because Lambda spun up all these containers and we hit connection limits that you would never expect to hit in a normal app.
.. So if you’ve got something sitting on a mainframe somewhere that is used to only having 20 connections and then you moved over some upstream service to Lambda and suddenly it has 10,000 connections instead of 20. You’ve got a problem.
.. You could have an application that’s actually looking at what’s happening in the code and saying: “Wow this one part of your code is taking a long time to run; we should make that its own Lambda function and we should automatically deploy that and set up this SNS trigger for you.” That’s all very pie in the sky, but I think we’re not that far off from having these tools.
AWS Summit: Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users
Cloud computing gives you a number of advantages, such as the ability to scale your web application or website on demand. If you have a new web application and want to use cloud computing, you might be asking yourself, “Where do I start?” Join us in this session to understand best practices for scaling your resources from zero to millions of users. We show you how to best combine different AWS services, how to make smarter decisions for architecting your application, and how to scale your infrastructure in the cloud.