alt Hacker NewsI feel like any company whose products have RESTful interfaces are already there…
One wants to turn on an indicator on a remote device. A simple Boolean value. But we need networking, TLS, authentication plugins, certificate validation, distributed logging, containers, orchestration, HTTP client/server, interprocess communication, daemon dependency management, …
Sure, one can say each of these layers and abstractions has an important and justifiable purpose. But one can also step back and start wondering - what the hell are we really doing???
At some level, it seems like each layer of abstraction has to manage others, only simply because they exist.
Imagine the simplicity of 1800s telegraph signaling - no software!
Too often we build systems with Fortune-50 style hierarchies when a 5-person team could do the whole job.
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Having worked in hardware for a moment, everything we do in software is like this. Even C.
There are a whole series of blog posts from the Fishworks guys explaining why it could possibly be so hard to turn on one LED.
But Oracle probably deleted then so you'll have to find them on archive.org.
Build a system as simple as possible but no simpler.
An 1800s telegraph system doesnt work in the modem world, there is far too much communication and the system would just collapse into molten slag.
All those things you've listed are because we live in an adversarial world and I'd steal all your money off the telegraph wire if you tried it.