Brian Holley's Links Blog

The tech industry is on a tear, building data centers for AI as quickly as they can buy up the land. The sky-high energy costs and logistical headaches of managing all those data centers have prompted interest in space-based infrastructure. Moguls like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have mused about putting GPUs in space, and now Google confirms it’s working on its own version of the technology. The company’s latest “moonshot” is known as Project Suncatcher, and if all goes as planned, Google hopes it will lead to scalable networks of orbiting TPUs.

Taking "moonshot" nearly literally, though nobody has yet proposed datacenters on the moon that I've heard of.

This seems like it has a veritable mountain of challenges to climb:

• Power - solar power is more efficient in space, but the amount of panel surface area needed to run modern GPUs or TPUs is very, very high.
• Cooling - space is cold, but radiating heat without convection is much more difficult and also requires large surface area devoted to heat transfer.
• Costs and depreciation - all of this needs to be launched into orbit, and unlike a space station GPUs and TPUs today seem to have very short useful shelf lives
• Maintenance - suddenly becoming a onsite data center tech at Google may be a very highly sought-after career

I believe the engineers at Google are smart enough to know all of these things already, but this seems, generously, farfetched.

Others seem to be of the same opinion: Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea

I am a former NASA engineer/scientist with a PhD in space electronics. I also worked at Google for 10 years, in various parts of the company including YouTube and the bit of Cloud responsible for deploying AI capacity, so I'm quite well placed to have an opinion here. The short version: this is an absolutely terrible idea, and really makes zero sense whatsoever.

Your favorite apps run on code maintained by exhausted volunteers. The databases powering your company? Built by developers working double shifts. Those JavaScript frameworks everyone depends on? Often shepherded by a single person, unpaid, drowning in demands.

The numbers are brutal. A 2023 survey found 73% out of 26,348 developers experienced burnout at some point. Another survey showed 60% of OSS maintainers considered leaving entirely. Burnout is a predictor of quitting. When developers burn out, they walk away.

Burnout potential is very real in tech right now. When the primary incentive for a lot of OSS maintainers is pride in their work, making into a negative feedback loop runs a real risk of people stepping away.

I monitored network traffic, decompiled code, and traced API calls for 200 funded AI startups. 73% are running third-party APIs with extra steps. OpenAI dominates, Claude is everywhere, and the gap between marketing and reality is staggering.

Love to see someone doing a sanity check on the hype and showing their work. I get founders being nervous about their competitive edge when every OpenAI demo day or Google announcement seems like it commoditizes another swath of the industry. This lesson can't be repeated enough (and applies broadly outside of AI startups as well):

The tech stack doesn’t matter as much as the problem you solve. Some of the best products I found were “just” wrappers. They had incredible UX, solved real problems, and were honest about their approach.

Private article, but the author includes a Medium gift link in the article itself.

Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like

The first puzzles will unlock on December 1st at midnight EST (UTC-5). See you then!

🎄🎉🙌

I have yet to get through a whole calendar (mid-December just gets too busy). This year's will be on my Github, just like previous years 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021

Every time I join a new team, I go to the next fresh page, and on top of that page I write: "WTF - [Team Name]." Then I make a note every time I run into something that makes me go "wtf," and a task every time I come up with something I want to change.

This has long been one of the first things I talk about to anyone that joins my team. The value of bringing in a fresh perspective to what the engineers on the team take for granted is almost impossible to overstate. It's how the team can catch when you're missing something obvious, doing something in a weird way, or just not taking advantage of things the rest of the industry has learned.

I love the framing from the author as to why this helps them build their technical reputation as well.

The feeling that I want to create, the association I want people to have with me, is, "Oh, Nat joined the team and little things started to get better, almost immediately. It feels like we're starting to make some progress.

There are two keys to success here. The first one, the author nails - keep your eyes open and listen first. The second one is about the habit building, know when to come back and take action on the things on your WTF list that still don’t make sense.

Agile didn’t fail you. The process theater did. A blunt look at why your team hates standups, story points, and pretending it’s working.

A good write-up of a common feeling across teams I've been on. When the process becomes the point and there's more emphasis on the names and the rituals than on using the flexibility of agile to get things done, then we've lost why this was supposed to be better. The core of the Agile Manifesto is 4 lines. When we care about the documentation more than the product, and about the roadmap more than what the customer needs, then we're not building the right thing anymore.