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Building for the 99% Developers

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Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#2
Excellent article.

Most people need to get some data from a database to a web page and back again, to paraphrase dhh (I think).

This does not require a huge amount of architecture or infrastructure in most cases, even at scale. The engineering challenges should be elsewhere, not in this relatively simple and solved problem.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#3

Excellent article. Most people need to get some data from a database to a web page and back again, to paraphrase dhh (I think). This does not require a huge amount of architecture or infrastructure in most cases, even at scale. The engineering challenges should be elsewhere , not in this relatively simple and solved problem.

It’s a solved problem? The most difficult to navigate and extended codebase I ever saw was a medium-to-large sized Rails codebase.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#5
post #3

Excellent article. Most people need to get some data from a database to a web page and back again, to paraphrase dhh (I think). This does not require a huge amount of architecture or infrastructure in most cases, even at scale. The engineering challenges should be elsewhere , not in this relatively simple and solved problem.

It’s a solved problem? The most difficult to navigate and extended codebase I ever saw was a medium-to-large sized Rails codebase.

Just a simple matter of programming

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#6
> Just like influencers in any other field, developer-influencers often describe a reality that is aspirational even for their own companies. It may be true that people writing about ideal processes live in an idealized situation where it’s possible, in which case they’re the exception that provides the rule. But most of the time — even if it’s true in one part of an organization or at one moment in time — this reality does not hold across their entire company and forever more.

BINGO! This really resonated with me. It's a good reminder that developer social media is going to have some of the same things going on as regular social media, like unrealistic comparisons to idealised snapshots.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#7
My personal recommendation is to do some self reflection on what things are most important to you when it comes to spinning up a new project and build your own kit. This is your tool bag as a developer.

I have seen a lot of people try this and fail because they aren’t building a personalized kit, they are putting together popular dependencies. That is radically different.

When you build your own kit it is tiny and extremely portable. You dig into the nuts and bolts to see what works and what plays well together. Since it’s all your personal preferences you maximize on productivity every time you use it. The best part is that you only have to build it once. Then after it’s a few hours of maintenance every six months as your requirements and preferences evolve.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#8
You'd be surprised at how fast you can create something with an SQL database, a well used backend framework (eg. Rails) and a well used frontend framework.

The things big tech companies do are usually to avoid scaling problems. In particular scaling on the engineering side. The above can scale to billions on the user side if needed but 10k engineers constantly updating and messing with a traditional SQL schema doesn't work.

You'd be crazy to try to replicate something like the big tech companies database storage systems when you're just starting out. You don't have 10k engineers. You may think "but i want to scale to a billion users". Well you still don't have those problems. The scaling problems big tech companies have are scaling to 10k engineers.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#9
On the one hand, your MVP version 1.0 should probably be built in anything that is fast and works.

On the other hand, you're gonna want to rebuild that ASAP in something that has legs for longevity's and paying down tech debt's sake. You won't potentially have an edge over any competitors by using their same tech stack.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#10
We way over complicate things.

SQLite can be used for 95% of real world use cases.

And whenever WAL2 + BEGIN CONCURRENT get merged into main, it will be able to handle 99% use cases.

And don’t fool yourself into believing you’re not in that 1%.

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