There was a survey of available GNSS corrections services from a couple of years ago - some of these services are global and not limited to a single country:

https://medium.com/@mikehorton/what-is-a-mass-market-gnss-co...

Nice! SWF is sadly an under-utilized service outside of Amazon - great to see more accessible abstractions being built on top of it. We wrote a simple abstraction around SWF to make is easier to work with:

https://github.com/swift-nav/wolf

Excited about the potential of using lambda functions with SWF - we have workflows with predominantly idle workers that would greatly benefit from it!

My favorite quote around this is from SICP's preface:

Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that 'computer science' is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology -- the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of 'what is.' Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of 'how to.'

And the quote that made me interested in CS, from the online lectures of the same book:

"[As] opposed to other kinds of engineering, where the constraints on what you can build are the constraints of physical systems ... the constraints imposed in building large software systems are the limitations of our own minds."

This poignant passage really stuck with me when I first picked up SICP in college. Thank you for reminding me of it!

Time to peruse my bookshelf for other inspiring quotes.

I'm not sure I'd be able to find a job if I told people I have a degree in procedural epistemology.

+1 for convox - takes the headaches out of AWS application orchestration best practices.

On the positive side, taking COS 333 with Kernighan could not possibly be worse than taking it with Koenig!

New Money needs a New CTO

Makes sense. I recently tried to send someone money on PayPal. They froze my account, and then CS suggested I wait 2 to 3 weeks for the account to unfreeze itself.

Welcome to new money.

When you call their tech support and their own tech support gives up on their products and just recommends the now PayPal owned Braintree...well that wasn't the only bad sign I guess.

BT has much less technical debt and thus more modern design. Most new merchants are encouraged to use v.zero (BT's xo product)

I wonder what the downvote rationale is here?

Ah you beat me to it. I was going to say he must have watched their Super Bowl commercial and figured it was all downhill from there.

This article feels like it's from years ago. Using Jenkins today is an anachronism - poor UI, poor configuration, poor scalability, poor distribution. My current employer has poured so much well intentioned effort into Jenkins' black hole. Never again.

What are you going to use instead?

I've been meaning to take a closer look at http://concourse.ci/ at some point. It looks like it could be a viable alternative to Jenkins for many things.

Migrating to Travis and a SWF-based solution, all driven by versioned configuration and code.

From a quick look Travis doesn't seem to be open-source or even usable on-premise.

Open source is not a requirement. Neither is the ability to run locally, which is something we'd like to very much move away from.

There's a great tangentially related article around this by Malcolm Gladwell on Albert Hirschman:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/24/the-gift-of-dou... http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674276604

'makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organizations: one, “exit,” is for the member to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing product, and the other, “voice,” is for members or customers to agitate and exert influence for change “from within.”'

Hope that helps you figure out whether to use your voice or your feet!

I once got this advice as, "Either change your organization or change your organization."

Is there an accessible description of the API? i.e., what's driving the "code generation process"? Is that open and something I could use to generate a client for <insert my favorite language here>?

Stay tuned for more details! The short answer is that yes, you'll be able to do that, but we haven't published that API description yet.

Completely agree. Would love to understand the money here - think it would provide a lot of perspective on how the technology financing community works.