Saturday, June 22, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Advice for Leading a Software Migration?

Ask HN: Advice for Leading a Software Migration?
17 by drekipus | 11 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, I'm about to take lead of a decent sized software migration at work. (From V1 of some subsystem, to v2, both in house. We want to deprecated and eventually remove V1 totally) For 8 of our clients, totalling about 16 million customers. I don't have too many details to share, as I don't know what's relevant. But I'm asking if anyone has any advice or recommended reading regarding such? One book that is really inspiring me about it is "how big things get done" by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. In it, there's some key bits of advice such as * Think slow, ask fast, and mitigate long tailed risks. * Compartmentalize and stick to repeated processes. "Build with LEGOs" * Look around at other projects of similar nature. The last point is why I'm here, as I know some of you have been in the game for longer than I have, so feel free to share experiences that you might think is relevant, if you'd like.

Monday, June 3, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager
22 by kylewlacy | 0 comments on Hacker News.
This is a project I've wanted to write for a long time now. I really love the ideas from Nix and I still have a ton of respect for the project, but Nix-the-language never felt intuitive to me and I wanted something with more approachable tooling (although this was circa 2016, so I'm sure Nix has improved a lot since then too-- that was before Flakes were around!) Anyway, I started on the current iteration of Brioche about 6 months ago, and I finally cut an initial release. I'd still consider this a "technical preview" version (performance especially is pretty painful, so that'll be a focus of mine in the coming weeks). But it's finally at a point where it does work end-to-end and folks can take it for a test drive!