While everyone has access to every RFC, this system makes picking out just the ones you care about much easier.
![jibber jabber hammer jibber jabber hammer](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8EJondM7ubA/hqdefault.jpg)
These additional details help with maintenance and avoid overload. Tags can include team or organization name, or the domain to which the RFC directly applies. I then gave my RFC a unique ID and tagged it with metadata to help other engineers who might be interested find it. As an example, to avoid “The Case Of The Mystery Servers” (the example I started this post with), I wrote up an RFC proposing that every service expose its ID through a standard mechanism, so you can find out what anything is… even if you don’t know what it is. So you write up a broad proposal about what you’re about to do and send it around to the entire engineering team to ask for their comments. You know there are lots of great engineers across Riot, including many who might be experts in your problem domain. Our general approach for RFCs is simple: let’s say you’re about to write a new system or make some non-trivial changes to an existing system. We hitched the name, but tweaked the process for our own needs. RFCs aren’t something we invented-internet standards are all RFCs, and communities like Python use a system called PEPs, which is very similar. And to get alignment we use a Request For Comment process.
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But, that doesn’t mean we’re left with a free for all: we have technical standards and engineering best practices like you’d expect. Here at Riot, we highly value autonomy in fact, we describe our teams as “highly aligned, highly autonomous.” That level of autonomy means that any kind of formal approval process for technical designs or standards - the kind where “ The Man” (pictured below) needs to put his or her rubber stamp on your design - wouldn’t work here.
JIBBER JABBER HAMMER HOW TO
But how to best establish such a standard? We need a standard for service identification.
![jibber jabber hammer jibber jabber hammer](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/NncAAOSwcJVd3rt7/s-l600.jpg)
We did eventually identify those machines so we could shut them down, but the experience left me thinking: we need a way of querying services, even if we don’t know what they are. When I asked about it, the answer I got was, “Yeah, we don’t actually know what’s running on those machines, so we can’t turn them off.”
![jibber jabber hammer jibber jabber hammer](https://66.media.tumblr.com/cc34697079f55121dcf9e8082c449cd0/tumblr_inline_p2phknjLd31ql4fti_640.gif)
I remember the first time I visited a Riot data center, where I saw a single rack of running servers completely surrounded by others that’d been powered down. Riot came after the invention of language, but still we suffer from some of the same problems-during those first formative years, everything happened so quickly that sometimes we forgot to write it down or capture it clearly. Sometimes, history feels like we’re collectively waking up after a drunken night out and asking, “My god, what did we do last night?” Who first invented the hammer? Hammers with handles have been around for tens of thousands of years, but nobody knows who made the first one for sure. I’ve always found it interesting how much we don’t know about human history simply because no one made a record at the time. My name’s Cam Dunn, and I’m the Tech Director for League.