Ditto. Let us know how you find it.

This is very basic overview plus lots of speculation and it's likely I'm missing some pieces.

Heroku is built on top of EC2. An EC2 instance is a virtual server complete with some amount of memory, processors, storage, etc running a server OS. A heroku dyno is basically one process on an EC2 instance, running your application.

I suspect that heroku is doing a fair bit behind the scenes to maximize the efficiency they get from their EC2 instances. My suspicion is that this means dynamic scaling of EC2 instances and rebalancing dynos across instances.

Provisioning new EC2 instances was one of the more heavily impacted AWS features. This means that herokus dynamic scaling could have broken, leaving them with not enough dynos to go around causing some rebalancing to fail. This could explain why my tiny heroku application went down at some point in time while others were unaffected.

I'm not sure but it seems likely that pushing to heroku to deploy means that they shut down your existing dynos and spin up new ones with the new code rather then restarting. This would mean that you don't necessarily end up with your app running in the same EC2 instance. With EC2 provisioning down they may not have had enough new dynos available to justify keeping the deployment service running (or it may have just failed as a result)

End of wild speculation

It's possible you're correct, but I suspect that there were many problems. S3 is just so basic. For all we know they use s3 to store build artifacts and so that broke. Or they depended on key storage with aws and that was broken. And so on...

It's probably impossible to know all the ways they completely depend on aws services.

Yeah, just fun to speculate.

Definitely. I spent a bit of time during the outage just going to different sites and seeing what was broken.

Software engineer detained at JFK, given test to prove he's an engineer:

I presume for the latter, he answered "it's a ******ed concept from like 20 years ago and like most modern engineers, I don't need it. Thanks all the same".

His answers were deemed wrong, btw, basically because they differed from what Wikipedia said.

LOL 20 years ago. The binary search tree was first published in 1960.

Lool I have no ****ing clue what a binary search tree is beyond just the vaguest idea. I would guess that it's basically just cut keep cutting the field in half?

I heard that it was likely that they weren't asking the questions to see if he knew the answer, but rather just how he would react and if he spoke intelligently about the subject.

What's wrong with abstract classes?

OO is out, FP is in, baby!

Now finding the 2nd max/min in a tree, thats where the real money engineers lie

Nothing really, was being hyperbolic. Old school OO not really in vogue these days. There would be plenty of talented engineers who have never used an abstract class.

BSTs are covered in algo 101.

Which was the last time most anyone coded one.

lol I've programmed that problem less than a year ago and there's no way I could answer that on the spot.

why the **** would a software engineer need to have working knowledge of a BST? Abstract classes? That question is vague as ****.

If you program in an OOP language and don't know what abstract base classes are, at least in theory, I'd give you the side-eye.

I think it's normal for a CS student to know what a BST is, and basically what it's for. I wouldn't expect them to invent it from first principles, but I think with some guidance they should be able to take a stab at it. Do I think it's a requirement to be a good programmer? Nah, probably not. It's a bias many people have, to assume that "smart" means "like me". It's something I've been working on because I have a lot of my own unfounded biases.

Now, asking this **** at the border is ****ing ridiculous. Like really maddening. I can not even.

I remember when I went to or came back from Australia that I could barely remember my address after the flight, let alone dictionary definitions from school.

Jonathan blow chimed in on the issue basically saying everyone that can't do that is a bad programmer. Guy is such an asshat.

I have a degree in physics. My only programming class in college was Fortran. So - never.

When you get to your late 40s this happens every weekend. It's awesome. You don't even need to go to Australia to forget everything you know!

I will be in meetings with people like "Who are you and what are you talking about?" and slowly it comes back to me that yeah - we talked about this for an hour last Thursday and I agreed to look into it. Oops.

This is such a honeypot.

You can basically take anything he says and use it as a heuristic for something not to do.

That explains it.

https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

Lol RCA on the Amazon outage. Some employee made a typo in one of their deployment commands to take a bunch of mission critical servers offline.

hiring outsourcers..

suppose i wanted to hire a javascript programmer.. i was thinking i could trial them by having them fix an issue for an open source project, paid of course. then i'd know whether they're familiar with the js framework or not, depending on how long it takes them

do you think thats a good idea to test the quality of the peson?

They should look into CI/CD.

God Twitter sucks. I follow him, but haven't seen a post from him in literally months.