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What the hell have you built

wthhyb.sacha.house

71–80 of 239 posts

Re: What the hell have you built

#71
post #8

What the hell have you built? Turns out a pretty straightforward service. That diagram is just aws, programming language, database. For some reason hadoop I guess. And riak/openstack as redundant. It just seems like pretty standard stuff with some seemingly small extra parts because that make me think that someone on the team was familiar with something like ruby, so they used that instead of using java. "Why is Redi…

This comment makes this thread a great time capsule. Given that the website is now over 10 years old, it perfectly illustrates how much 'best practices' and architectural complexity (and cloud bills) have changed since then.

Re: What the hell have you built

#72
The problem with doing things the sensible way (eschewing microservices and k8s when you work on projects that aren't hyperscale) is that you end up missing opportunities later on because recruiters will filter you because you can't meaningfully respond to the question about “how experienced you are with micro service architecture”. Granted I may have dodged a bullet by not joining a company with 50 engineers that claim to replicate Google's practices (most of which are here to make sure tens of thousands of engineers can work efficiently together), but still someone gets to pay the bill at the end of the month…

Re: What the hell have you built

#74
post #64

An 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 fro…

This comment sums up my view as well, but I must confess that I’ve designed architectures more complex than necessary more than once, just to try new things and compare them with what I already knew. I just had to know!

Re: What the hell have you built

#76

Thinking 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!

The cloud-native version of "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM"

Re: What the hell have you built

#77
post #3

s/postgres/sqlite/g

ORMs have better support I've found in the past (at least in .NET and Go) for Postgres. Especially around date types, UUIDs and JSON fields IIRC.

You don’t need an ORM either. It’s just another level of complexity for very little to no gain in almost all cases. Just write SQL.

Re: What the hell have you built

#78

"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.

Imho, if you can, use a fixed chunk of server memory directly for cache. That scales out with instances if/when you ever scale out

Re: What the hell have you built

#79
post #11
post #3

s/postgres/sqlite/g

This. So much this. Of course, at one point you start wanting to do queues, and concurrent jobs, and not even WAL mode and a single writer approach can cut it, but if you've reached that point then usually you a) are in that "this is a good problem to have" scalability curve, and b) you can just switch to Postgres. I've built pretty scalable things using nothing but Python, Celery and Postgres (that usually started a…

A queue and a database are more shots on the architecture golf though.

Re: What the hell have you built

#80

I built a small simple page that I send to people when they start proposing crazy db architectures that people might like if they like this page: https://nocommasql.com/

Useful, but 10 years ago without JSONB in PG it wasn't really the answer to everything. But as of today, I am recommending PG to anyone that does not have a good reason or use case to NOT use it.
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