

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant (2011) - p8952
https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

======
wtbob
Man, I really, _really_ miss Steve's blog rants. I wonder if Google hired him
so that he would write those just for their own internal audience.

It's amazing: you go back to stuff he wrote a decade ago, and it's _still_
highly relevant. Not a thing has changed!

Maybe a bunch of folks could fund a Kickstarter to get him to write publicly
once more…

~~~
swah
I'd tell you privately but you don't have an email listed: I also really,
really miss his rants.

Maybe we should create a support group?

I've set up the word "Yegge" on HNWatcher to alert me about posts like this,
so I can find people discussing his posts the much-awaited day when he leaves
Google and returns to full-time blogging and game playing.

I haven't been able to find many posts with that drunken spirit - they are
about software, but also about the culture around it, not that technical, and
smart and funny but didn't make "us" feel nerdy and lesser. While still
reminding how dislocated some of us feel amongst regular humans.

See also [http://blog.fogus.me/2011/03/27/the-long-lost-art-of-
thought...](http://blog.fogus.me/2011/03/27/the-long-lost-art-of-
thoughtfulness-in-blogging/)

------
guelo
Yegge was one of the best tech bloggers but sadly I don't think he's done any
public writing since this leak.

~~~
ignoramous
Ironically, this very post wasn't even meant to be public.

~~~
nl
Almost like those two facts are connected somehow!

------
felixgallo
It's more than a little sad that Steve appears to have been largely ignored.

~~~
evjan
You mean internally?

I love Steve's writing and it would be a mistake not to listen to him

~~~
nostrademons
I don't think he's being ignored. Take a look here:

[https://cloud.google.com/](https://cloud.google.com/)

And here:

[https://console.developers.google.com/project](https://console.developers.google.com/project)

Also the open-source releases of Bazel[1] and gRPC[2] indicate that there's a
lot more coming in this direction.

[1] [http://bazel.io/](http://bazel.io/)

[2] [http://www.grpc.io/](http://www.grpc.io/)

~~~
felixgallo
You seem to have linked to Google's slightly inferior, copycat cloud offering.

I read Steve's rant as a cri de coeur not for an AWS-style infrastructure as
was relevant and genre-busting at the time of the essay's inception, but for
Google to stop following slowly with slightly inferior, copycat versions of
other people's grand ideas and expecting anything good to happen out of it.

Granted, Google has some pretty great, if in-the-small, consumer-facing
initiatives: think Street View.

But as one of the primary governments of the internet, they could be doing so
much more to move the needle for computing and advance the general state of
the art.

Where's googlelang?

Where's infinite instant CI for any language?

Where's infinite immutable package versioning for every language?

Where's the big thoughts?

~~~
nostrademons
It takes time to move the needle. Google has probably the best infrastructure
in the world, but it was designed for Google's problems, tightly intertwined
with the products it supports, and built for a different
performance/productivity trade-off than most independent customers are willing
to put up with. Even now, GCE beats EC2 on price/performance metrics, it just
lacks some of the conveniences that AWS users expect.

~~~
felixgallo
That's kind. You could also say that google has had a mediocre, confusing,
poorly supported also-ran cloud offering for years and shows no sign of doing
anything but continuing the current path.

The needle is moved by having nontraditional ideas and following through with
commitment. I know Google has enough great minds for (a), where, bafflingly,
is (b)?

------
WestCoastJustin
*2011. Still an amazing post. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3138826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3138826)

~~~
p8952
Cheers, I didn't even notice it was from 2011 as it just popped up on my
Twitter feed today. I've added that to the title.

------
ecaradec
A few days ago I found this :

[http://www.amazon.fr/Programmers-Rantings-Programming-
Langua...](http://www.amazon.fr/Programmers-Rantings-Programming-Language-
Religions-Philosophies-
ebook/dp/B00AGXSIXW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1428352970&sr=8-)
2&keywords=steve+yegge

I didn't bought it because I expected it to be the blog posts in another
format, but may be there are a few newer things. I'll probably buy it anyway.

__I missed the last sentence, it's a collection of blogs posts__

~~~
swah
Wow, I had never heard of this "book". Anyone bought it? Is there anything
more than in the two blogs?

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theharshest
Agree with what he said about Amazon's recruitment. Amazon's recruiting
process is flawed and highly uncertain. Seems like recruiters are not in sync
even with each other.

~~~
pipeep
I agree. I did an internship with them, and was told I'd get a return offer
for the next summer. It took the recruiter _months_ to get it to me, and they
initially _decreased_ my salary, until I pointed it out. I only actually
received it after informing them I had competing offers. Recruiting seems very
poorly managed.

That's not a reason to not apply though. I was in a great team, and they're a
good place to work. I just wish they could fix their recruiting problem.

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jayvanguard
+1 Yegge's blog (heck, +10). I miss it.

What is actually so interesting about this post though is how wrong he was
about distributed architecture and the micro-services approach.

Amazon, while their recruiting process may still have flaws, has created the
future of computing by realizing the original vision of "The Network is the
Computer." No other company has done this on such a scale with such success.

But yeah, more Yegge. Even when he was wrong he got people thinking and
talking.

~~~
swah
> how wrong he was about distributed architecture and the micro-services
> approach

Care to elaborate? In 2011 I think the approach was quite successful already
(well, for big companies like Amazon)...

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TazeTSchnitzel
> whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful
> product such as the Playstation Network.

Okay, that one made me laugh.

