Shared State When programming distributed systems, the hardest kind of data to manage is shared mutable state. It requires some kind of synchronization between writers to avoid missed updates. And, after changes, it requires some kind of mechanism to restore coherence between readers. I previously wrote about that idea of a coherence penalty as it applies to humans. Following those lines, we might regard the system of development teams in an organization as its own distributed system.
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Shared Mutable Team State -
Coherence Penalty for Humans This is a brief aside from my ongoing series about avoiding entity services. An interesting dinner conversation led to thoughts that I needed to write down. Amdahl's Law In 1967, Gene Amdahl presented a case against multiprocessing computers. He argued that the maximum speed increase for a task would be limited because only a portion of the task could be split up and parallelized. This portion, the "
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People Don't Belong to Organizations One company that gets this right is Github. I exist as my own person there. I'm affiliated with my employer as well as other organizations. We are long past the days of "the company man," when a person's identity was solely bound to their employer. That relationship is much more fluid now. A company that gets it wrong is Atlassian. I've left behind a trail of accounts in various Jirae and Confluences.
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