Ship It! Cloud, SRE, Platform Engineering Abstractions and implementations
Nov 22, 2024
Hazel Weakly, an expert in infrastructure and community building, shares insights on when to create abstractions versus using existing implementations. She highlights the value of psychological safety in tech teams and reflects on her experiences at tech conferences. The discussion touches on the evolution of programming languages and the trade-offs involved in engineering practices. Additionally, they explore the importance of community and open-source tools in fostering collaboration and innovation.
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Abstraction Constraints
- Abstractions in software lack the physical constraints of the real world, making them less reusable.
- This leads to frequent rewrites and limits the depth of abstraction we can effectively manage.
Abstraction Compactification
- Software abstractions evolve, but lack the "compactification" seen in physical world, hindering the building of truly reusable abstractions.
- The industry has stopped compacting older layers as it creates new ones.
Real Abstractions
- Real abstractions represent shared understanding and emergent behavior within a specific problem domain.
- These abstractions are built through iterative layers of understanding and vocabulary.