Written by Stephen van Egmond.
Filed under practicality.
Wednesday, October 28 2009
There's nothing like a visit to a Internet datacenter to remind you of the realities of being a product developer.
I had to go to 151 Front to replace a blown hard drive in one of our computers, and I was thrilled to be so close to the actual, whirring, blinking, heart of the Canadian Internet.
These places are pure pragmatism: there's people and equipment out front who are very good at keeping you out; there's multiple feeds from the various utilities and Internet feeds that come in; there's power generators and giant diesel tanks and air conditioners whose cooling power is measured in tons. They laugh at your puny household BTUs.
All of this is designed to get bits from A to B, efficiently, and taking into account the fact that every single piece of electronics in that building will break or get replaced within 5 years. Except the monitors they wheel around to plug into servers to look at the console: that's a 1992-era CRT.
So much of the software industry is based on cowboyism and posturing. If you drrink the kool-aid passed around the Rails and Drupal communities, everyone is one caffeinated coding binge away from a brilliant product. Install the right gem, find the right module, get mentioned on Techcrunch. Step 3: profit! Shouldn't we take at least as much care and forethought as the hardware crew?
I'm encouraged by the work of people like Greg Wilson who want to reconnect academic Computer Science with what industry is up to, and who have something to say about the stories we're telling ourselves. Like he says: data is ones and zeroes. Software is ones and zeroes and hard work.
