November 2020
Beginner to intermediate
250 pages
7h 41m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every SRE Should Know
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Chapter 65. Complex: The Most Overloaded Word in Technology
Laura Nolan
Both software engineers and systems engineers use the word “complex” as a specific term of art. Software engineers use it in several ways, distinct from the systems meaning. Software engineers and systems engineers (SREs, production engineers, systems administrators, DevOps practitioners, etc.) are overlapping groups of people who work together. We all need to understand which meaning is in use at any given time so we can communicate clearly.
Complexity has been the enemy of the software engineer for decades now. Fred Brooks’ classic essay, “No Silver Bullet,”1 divided software’s complexity into two parts: essential complexity and accidental complexity. Essential complexity is related solely to specifying the problem and how it should be solved. Accidental complexity is related to the details of implementation. The overwhelming majority of the work of technology operation is about accidental complexity.
However, this doesn’t tell us what software engineers mean by complexity. Fundamentally, complexity is that which makes software difficult to understand fully and to reason about correctly. Moseley and Marks’ paper, “Out of the Tar Pit”, discusses several sources of complexity. The biggest, and hardest to deal with, is state. State influences the flow of control of a program, but the number of potential states ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.