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What the hell have you built
61–70 of 239 posts
Re: What the hell have you built
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really for "fun"? Or is it to satisfy the ideals of some CTO/VPE disconnected from the real world that wants architecture to be done a certain way? I still remember doing systems design interviews a few years ago when microservices were in vogue, and my routine was probing if they were ok with a simpler monolith or if they wanted to go crazy on cloud-native, serverless and microservices shizzle. It did backfire…
I dont quite follow. I understand mono vs micro services, and in the last 3 weeks I had to study for system design and do the interviews to get offers. Its a tradeoff, and the system design interview is meant to see if one understands how systems can scale to hypothetical (maybe unrealistic) high loads. In this context the only reason for a microservice is independent scaling and with that also fault tolerance if an…
In practice, it seems not to be a tradeoff but an ideology. Largely because you can't measure the counter-factual of building the app the other way.
It's been a long time since I've done "normal" web development, but I've done a number of high-performance or high-reliability non-web applications, and I think people really underestimate vertical scaling. Even back in the early 2000s when it was slightly hard to get a machine with 128GB of RAM to run some chip design software, doing so was much easier than trying to design a distributed system to handle the problem.
(we had a distributed system of ccache/distcc to handle building the thing instead)
Do people have a good example of microservices they can point us to the source of? By definition it's not one of those things that makes much sense with toy-sized examples. Things like Amazon and Twitter have "micro" services that are very much not micro.
Re: What the hell have you built
#63I feel like sometimes it’s a form of procrastination. There are things we don’t want to do (talk to costumers, investors, legal, etc.), so instead we do the fun things (fun for engineers). It’s a convenient arrangement because we can easily convince ourselves and others that we’re actually being productive (we’re not, we’re just spinning wheels).
My first 5 years or so of solo bootstrapping were this. Then you learn that if you want to make money you have to prioritise the right things and not the fun things.
Re: What the hell have you built
#64An improved CV, lets be honest most stuff is boring projects that could even be built with 1990's technology, distributed systems is not something that was invented yesterday.
However having in the CV any of those items from left side in the deployment strategy is way cooler than mentioning n-tier architecture, RPC (regardless how they are in the wire), any 1990's programming language, and so forth.
A side effect from how hiring works so badly in our industry, it isn't enough to know how master a knife to be a chef, it must be a specific brand of knife, otherwise the chef is not good enough for the kitchen.
Re: What the hell have you built
#65Yet the author spent a whole afternoon (hopefully not more!) writing a website to tell some people (who exactly?) that they’re doing it wrong.
it's a web page on a subdomain of his existing personal website, so probably didn't take him much time at all, probably about as fast as it would take to write up the text in a word document and then farting around with the styling and javascript a bit.
Re: What the hell have you built
#66"Maybe Redis for caching". Really that's going way too far - you do NOT need Redis for caching. Just put it in Postgres. Why go to this much trouble to put people in their place for over engineering then concede "maybe Redis for caching" when this is absolutely something you can do in Postgres. The author clearly cannot stop their own inner desire for overengineering.
Sometimes you have to pick your poison when those with other agendas or just inexperience want to complicate things. Conceding that they can use Redis somehow might be enough to get them to stop blaming you for the 'out of date' architecture?
Re: What the hell have you built
#67I love the fact that the author "wrote" this page with massive CSS framework (tailwind) and some sort of Javascript framework, with a bundler and obfuscator - instead of a plain, simple HTML page. Well played! :-)
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Re: What the hell have you built
#68Thinking is scary. No one (among non-thinking colleagues) is going to criticize you for using de-facto standard services like kafka, mongo, redis, ecc... regardless of the nonsensical architecture you come up with. Yes, I also put Redis in that list. You can cache and serve data structure in many other ways, for example replicate the individual features you need in you application instead of going the lazy route and…
> No one (among non-thinking colleagues) is going to criticize you for using de-facto standard services
Well put!
Re: What the hell have you built
#69Nah, postgres is overhyped, MariaDB is enough and recently: https://mariadb.org/mariadb-vs-postgresql-understanding-the-... >
I love this comment because it misses the point in exactly the way the article talks about.
No it doesn't. The fact that the article had to say "Maybe Redis for caching" because Postgres can't handle caching at scale shows that Postgres is not a perfect solution. Choosing an alternative database that can do everything you need means simplifying your architecture in the spirit of the article (not to say that MariaDB specifically is the right choice here, I'm not familiar enough with it to comment on that).
Re: What the hell have you built
#70But that’s half the fun (and knowledge about these systems got me my current job)