"We ran out of columns"
jimmyhmiller.github.io
"We ran out of columns"
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Re: "We ran out of columns"
#2The first line really hits me hard. There’s something so incredibly freeing about being a kid and doing stuff like coding. There’s simply no expectations. Even the smallest project felt like such an achievement. But now I code professionally and I don’t know how to turn off engineering brain. I don’t know how to be okay doing something poorly, but on my terms.
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#3> I miss that direct connection. The fast feedback. The lack of making grand plans.
There's no date on this article, but it feels "prior to the MongoDB-is-webscale memes" and thus slightly outdated?
But, hey, I get where they're coming from. Personally, I used to be very much schema-first, make sure the data makes sense before even thinking about coding. Carefully deciding whether to use an INT data type where a BYTE would do.
Then, it turned out that large swathes of my beautiful, perfect schemas remained unoccupied, while some clusters were heavily abused to store completely unrelated stuff.
These days, my go-to solution is SQLite with two fields (well, three, if you count the implicit ROWID, which is invaluable for paging!): ID and Data, the latter being a JSONB blob.
Then, some indexes specified by `json_extract` expressions, some clever NULL coalescing in the consuming code, resulting in a generally-better experience than before...
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#4He acts like sequence key is odd, but that’s quite normal in database world.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createsequence.h...
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#5> I miss that direct connection. The fast feedback. The lack of making grand plans. There's no date on this article, but it feels "prior to the MongoDB-is-webscale memes" and thus slightly outdated? But, hey, I get where they're coming from. Personally, I used to be very much schema-first, make sure the data makes sense before even thinking about coding. Carefully deciding whether to use an INT data type where a BYTE…
Oh good question on date essay was written -- put dates on your things on the internet people!
Internet Archive has a crawl from today but no earlier; which doesn't mean it can't be earlier of course. My guess is it was written recently though.
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#6The first line really hits me hard. There’s something so incredibly freeing about being a kid and doing stuff like coding. There’s simply no expectations. Even the smallest project felt like such an achievement. But now I code professionally and I don’t know how to turn off engineering brain. I don’t know how to be okay doing something poorly, but on my terms.
What ever small success I had outside work has been whenever I managed to turn off Enterprise brain.
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#7> I miss that direct connection. The fast feedback. The lack of making grand plans. There's no date on this article, but it feels "prior to the MongoDB-is-webscale memes" and thus slightly outdated? But, hey, I get where they're coming from. Personally, I used to be very much schema-first, make sure the data makes sense before even thinking about coding. Carefully deciding whether to use an INT data type where a BYTE…
I’m still in the think hard about the schema camp. I like to rely on the database to enforce constraints.
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#8The first line really hits me hard. There’s something so incredibly freeing about being a kid and doing stuff like coding. There’s simply no expectations. Even the smallest project felt like such an achievement. But now I code professionally and I don’t know how to turn off engineering brain. I don’t know how to be okay doing something poorly, but on my terms.
Writers often say that your first N books will be crap, and the answer to that problem is to just write more than N books. I feel that’s true of software as well - the first years of the magical programming I did without any expectations meant those projects were utter crap yet functional.
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#9He acts like sequence key is odd, but that’s quite normal in database world. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createsequence.h...
yeah, I've seen tables with a single row and single columns a few times, for alright reasons. Sometimes you do just want to store a single global value!
Re: "We ran out of columns"
#10He acts like sequence key is odd, but that’s quite normal in database world. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createsequence.h...
Yes, but both these have very different properties. He said (I don't know if its the case) that the db didnt have an autoincremental type. Postgres uses these sequence objects to implement autoincremental ids as he was referring to, they are implemented in-engine and are very fast and have already solved data races.
In the article, what he complains about is not about what a sequence is, but about implementing it manually with a table that is read, incremented and then saved. This us more expensive, and depending on how it was implemented you need to take care of the whole data flow so you are unable to allocate the same id twice. That's what he considers odd