Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

gkogan.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 271 posts

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#3

Post by carlmr »

>For example, an analytics dashboard built with a no-code analytics tool like Looker is likely to have more qualified people to fix it than one built with a patchwork of custom scripts and APIs. Nobody should have to pull data scientists or product developers away from their work to fix a bar chart.

I don't have experience with Looker, but the unseen complexity of no-code tools often leads to very complex systems with interactions that are hard to understand. A dashboard may not have that many interactions with other tools, but the black box nature of these kinds of tools usually leads to significant downtimes when there's a small detail not working as expected, or where you need a small customization that wasn't foreseen by the no-code API creators.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#5

Post by buremba »

carlmr wrote: post #3

>For example, an analytics dashboard built with a no-code analytics tool like Looker is likely to have more qualified people to fix it than one built with a patchwork of custom scripts and APIs. Nobody should have to pull data scientists or product developers away from their work to fix a bar chart. I don't have experience with Looker, but the unseen complexity of no-code tools often leads to very complex systems wit…

That's true for drag&drop tools that provide a user interface as an alternative but Looker or similar tools introduce their own language that limits your capability by sandboxing the environment but still lets you programmatically define your models. See LookML for Looker (https://docs.looker.com/data-modeling/learning-lookml/what-i...) or Jsonnet for Rakam. (https://docs.rakam.io/docs/compose)

P.S: I'm affiliated with the company Rakam.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#7

Post by monus »

Usually, being easy is confused with being simple. Easy to use systems usually tend to be very complex but they'd only hide it from the average user. Once you go one step ahead, do something outside of quick start, you find yourself helpless. In that sense, the article is on point. Not only the management of the ship is simple, machinery behind the scenes is simple as well.

This applies to programming languages, too. Python is easy but when you do advanced stuff, often without realizing, you start to grok many complex details to make it work or make it work in a performant way. On the other hand, Go (and Rust supposedly, but I don't have experience) is simple. It doesn't let you do many things and that results in fewer ways of doing a specific task but when you do it, you feel safer because in the end, it does look and feel simple although you spent 1+ hour than you'd normally spend compared to coding in Python (this assumes you're doing some advanced stuff, not quick start).

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

#9

Post by uk_programmer »

This feels like it is stating the obvious. However it is easily forgotten.

A lot of Software Engineers / Developers in my experience tend to over engineer projects or they are mandated they do so by so their dev leads. It is easy to get caught up into abstracting almost everything away almost for the sake of it while it provides no real benefit.

Post reply on HN