Episode #97: How Serverless Fits in to the Cyclical Nature of the Industry with Gojko Adzic

Serverless Chats

About Gojko Adzic

Gojko Adzic is a partner at Neuri Consulting LLP. He one of the 2019 AWS Serverless Heroes, the winner of the 2016 European Software Testing Outstanding Achievement Award, and the 2011 Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Award. Gojko’s book Specification by Example won the Jolt Award for the best book of 2012, and his blog won the UK Agile Award for the best online publication in 2010.

Gojko is a frequent speaker at software development conferences and one of the authors of MindMup and Narakeet.

As a consultant, Gojko has helped companies around the world improve their software delivery, from some of the largest financial institutions to small innovative startups. Gojko specializes in agile and lean quality improvement, in particular impact mapping, agile testing, specification by example, and behavior driven development.

Twitter: @gojkoadzic
Narakeet: https://www.narakeet.com
Personal website: https://gojko.net

Watch this video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kCDDli7uzn8

This episode is sponsored by CBT Nuggets: https://www.cbtnuggets.com/

Transcript
Jeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today my guest is Gojko Adzic. Hey Gojko, thanks for joining me.

Gojko: Hey, thanks for inviting me.

Jeremy: You are a partner at Neuri Consulting, you're an AWS Serverless Hero, you've written I think, what? I think 6,842 books or something like that about technology and serverless and all that kind of stuff. I'd love it if you could tell listeners a little bit about your background and what you've been working on lately.

Gojko: I'm a developer. I started developing software when I was six and a half. My dad bought a Commodore 64 and I think my mom would have kicked him out of the house if he told her that he bought it for himself, so it was officially for me.

Jeremy: Nice.

Gojko: And I was the only kid in the neighborhood that had a computer, but didn't have any ways of loading games on it because he didn't buy it for games. I stayed up and copied and pasted PEEKs and POKEs in a book I couldn't even understand until I made the computer make weird sounds and print rubbish on the screen. And that's my background. Basically, ever since, I only wanted to build software really. I didn't have any other hobbies or anything like that. Currently, I'm building a product for helping tech people who are not video editing professionals create videos very easily. Previously, I've done a lot of work around consulting. I've built a lot of product that is used by millions of school children worldwide collaborate and brainstorm through mind-mapping. And since 2016, most of my development work has been on Lambda and on team stuff.

Jeremy: That's awesome. I joke a little bit about the number of books that you wrote, but the ones that you have, one of them's called Running Serverless. I think that was maybe two years ago. That is an excellent book for people getting started with serverless. And then, one of my probably favorite books is Humans Vs Computers. I just love that collection of tales of all these things where humans just build really bad interfaces into software and just things go terribly.

Gojko: Thank you very much. I enjoyed writing that book a lot. One of my passions is finding edge cases. I think people with a slight OCD like to find edge cases and in order to be a good developer, I think somebody really needs to have that kind of intent, and really look for edge cases everywhere. And I think collecting these things was my idea to help people first of all think about building better software, and to realize that stuff we might glance over like, nobody's ever going to do this, actually might cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damage ten years later. And thanks very much for liking the book.

Jeremy: If people haven't read that book, I don't know, when did that come out? Maybe 2016? 2015?

Gojko: Yeah, five or six years ago, I think.

Jeremy: Yeah. It's still completely relevant now though and there's just so many great examples in there, and I don't want to spent the whole time talking about that book, but if you haven't read it, go check it out because it's these crazy things like police officers entering in no plates whenever they're giving parking tickets. And then, when somebody actually gets that, ends up with thousands of parking tickets, and it's just crazy stuff like that. Or, not using the middle initial or something like that for the name, or the birthdate or whatever it was, and people constantly getting just ... It's a fascinating book. Definitely check that out.

But speaking of edge cases and just all this experience that you have just dealing with this idea of, I guess finding the problems with software. Or maybe even better, I guess a good way to put it is finding the limitations that we build into software mostly unknowingly. We do this unknowingly. And you and I were having a conversation the other day and we were talking about way, way back in the 1970s. I was born in the late '70s. I'm old but hopefully not that old. But way back then, time-sharing was a thing where we would basically have just a few large computers and we would have to borrow time against them. And there's a parallel there to what we were doing back then and I think what we're doing now with cloud computing. What are your thoughts on that?

Gojko: Yeah, I think absolutely. We are I think going in a slightly cyclic way here. Maybe not cyclic, maybe spirals. We came to the same horizontal position but vertically, we're slightly better than we were. Again, I didn't start working then. I'm like you, I was born in late '70s. I wasn't there when people were doing punch cards and massive mainframes and time-sharing. My first experience came from home PC computers and later PCs. The whole serverless thing, people were disparaging about that when the marketing buzzword came around. I don't remember exactly when serverless became serverless because we were talking about microservices and Lambda was a way to run microservices and execute code on demand. And all of a sudden, I think the JAWS people realized that JAWS is a horrible marketing name, and decided to rename it to serverless. I think it most important, and it was probably 2017 or something like that. 2000 ...

Jeremy: Something like that, yeah.

Gojko: Something like that. And then, because it is a horrible marketing name, but it's catchy, it caught on and then people were complaining how it's not serverless, it's just somebody else's servers. And I think there's some truth to that, but actually, it's not even somebody else's servers. It really is somebody else'...