Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Steve Blank tells the Secret History of Silicon Valley. What a long, strange trip it is.

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

• $27 billion: CapEx invested by leading cloud vendors in first quarter of 2018; $40 billion: App store revenue in 10 years; $57.5 billion: venture investment first half of 2018; 1 billion: Utah voting system per day hack attempts; 67%: did not deploy a serverless app last year; $1.8 billion: made by Pokeman GO; $13 billion: Netflix's new content budget; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @davidbrunelle: The best developers and engineering leaders I've personally worked with do *not* have a notable presence on GitHub or public bodies of speaking or writing work. I worry that a lot of folks confuse celebrity and visibility with talent and ability.
  • Bernard Golden: The tech industry has never seen this level of investment [in datacenters]. The investment we’re seeing in cloud capacity really has no precedent, save perhaps Henry Ford’s manic factory building for his Model T, the US government’s armaments efforts in WWII, and Foxconn’s manufacturing support for smartphones. As Ford’s efforts presaged the boom growth of the industrial economy, so too do (cloud) investments augur the explosion of the digital economy.
  • @kellabyte: The issue with microservices is it’s taught people to stop thinking about cohesiveness.  Cohesiveness is really important. When you fight against it you experience major pain and Service Autonomy works much better as a cohesive unit not just making “micro” things everywhere.
  • Leslie Lamport: Today, programming is generally equated with coding. It's hard to convince students who want to write code that they should learn to think mathematically, above the code level, about what they’re doing. Perhaps the following observation will give them pause. It's quite likely that during their lifetime, machine learning will completely change the nature of programming. The programming languages they are now using will seem as quaint as Cobol, and the coding skills they are learning will be of little use. But mathematics will remain the queen of science, and the ability to think mathematically will always be useful.
  • Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari: What everybody wanted was a party and some beer and some pizza, and they ended up going home with each other.
  • @Grady_Booch: Ada Lovelace devised the first program. Grace Hopper wrote the first complier. Margaret Hamilton started the field of software engineering. Women have always been and will always be essential to the advance of computing.
  • Hossein Fateh: The largest deal of 2001 was 3.5 megawatts. That same company leased 35 megawatts from us in 2016. The decimal place moved by a column. The next decimal place will move in 2022. Deals will be 350 megawatts.
  • Matt Alderman: Based on our estimates, AWS Fargate deployments should save you 5 percent to 10 percent in your compute bill as compared to highly optimized AWS ECS or EKS deployments.
  • Memory Guy: Conventional wisdom holds that SSDs will someday displace all HDDs, but in reality SSDs are proving to be more of a challenge to the DRAM market than to the HDD market...So, if you have a fixed budget, SSDs can help you get the most out of your system and are a better alternative than additional DRAM.
  • @JoeEmison: Given this context, it is insane to say that something like AWS AppSync is bad lock-in. If I want AppSync functionality, I have two choices: use AppSync, or write AppSync myself. Given those, how is using AppSync until it makes sense for me to write my own a bad move?
  • More, more, more, more, more...