31–40 of 374 posts
The problem with the non-boring technology club is that programmers see what problem FAANG companies are solving and wanting to be on the edge on new technology too. But they don‘t have the same problems. Another problem is they want to show what they can do. If they tell in an interview they are working with rails/django and a postgresql database they fear they look incompetent using those old technologies. So they…
They sure had fun building it though.
I always found it funny that companies will go to extreme Herculean lengths to hire the best programmers, and are incredibly fearful and paranoid that they could be making a "bad hire", and yet once hired they don't spend a second making sure engineers aren't completely running the software product off the rails and killing the company internally. The author mentions trying to rewrite Etsy's backend in Scala and Mong…
> The last line of defense against a rogue engineering team is managers who have studied this stuff. If your engineering team is the one pushing in that direction I'd reckon the company was in a bad spot to begin with to have hired that team because it strongly indicates that the management layer (head of tech/CTO) has no technical clue. Hire strong Lead Developers with a proven track record of delivering value to co…
This is why I prefer buying 15+ year old cars, you know everything that's wrong with them. OK, it just so happens that three cars I've owned has been over 15 years old when I bought them, but I haven't heard a good car analogy in a while.
Just like modern web apps are far more scalable, highly-available, secure and performant then they were 15 years ago.
Urgh, this feels familiar. Last year I left a company that was just wrapping up a new tech product, everything was microservices and mongodb. Trying to get a simple answer out of the engineering team about something as trivial as “how can I get a list of customers who have purchased product X” was almost impossible. They sure had fun building it though.
If your query was exposed as a REST API you could have easily accessed it via a micro-service. And MongoDB has a pretty powerful and easy to use query language. I could've answered your query in about 5s.
Sounds more like a business or process limitation.
The redis/memcache example doesn't make a lot of sense to me, unless the idea is that a separate memcache instance is deployed alongside each backend, while redis would have been a single instance. I'm all for boring technology; reimplementing web protocols and semantics in JS is a disaster - and would probably have made a clearer case study than comparing to memory-first database caches.
Especially when he said that some people did have to work on that setup to scale it up. Sounds like devops work, so the same would have happened with redis, right?
I always found it funny that companies will go to extreme Herculean lengths to hire the best programmers, and are incredibly fearful and paranoid that they could be making a "bad hire", and yet once hired they don't spend a second making sure engineers aren't completely running the software product off the rails and killing the company internally. The author mentions trying to rewrite Etsy's backend in Scala and Mong…
I had a small business depending on the Etsy API during the time they transitioned some storage to Mongo. The immediate effect for us was a downturn in functionality and reliability with no apparent advantages. In the midst of other serious concerns about their direction, we questioned why Etsy was doing this on the API mailing list and were told basically we didn't know what we were talking about and it wasn't out b…
https://mcfunley.com/why-mongodb-never-worked-out-at-etsy
Which was compiled here:
The problem with the non-boring technology club is that programmers see what problem FAANG companies are solving and wanting to be on the edge on new technology too. But they don‘t have the same problems. Another problem is they want to show what they can do. If they tell in an interview they are working with rails/django and a postgresql database they fear they look incompetent using those old technologies. So they…
Basecamp is a simple app though. Ridiculously simple. That app could have been written in the mid-1990s using WebObjects in just a few months. Technologies like MongoDB, React, GraphQL, Microservices etc exist because modern, real-world apps are generally far more advanced than just a glorified CRUD app. Consumers simply have higher expectations and more demands for what web apps should be able to do.
... are they?
I can understand this from the perspective of a manager or company owner. "Happiness comes from shipping products" or "Choose boring technology" make a lot of sense if you are maximizing profit and don't need to work with the tech yourself. If you are an engineer and you want to try a new technology, go for it. Even if it doesn't make sense. Learn new things, don't stick with the boring tech. Maximize your own happin…