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Building for the 99% Developers

future.a16z.com

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Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#11

Post by arvinsim »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #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'…

One cannot predict the future but I agree that for most indie outfits, YAGNI would apply.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#12

Post by FpUser »

>"Should you move to serverless? Is GraphQL the answer to your API woes? Should you follow the latest DevOps playbook to increase your system reliability? In the world of tech tools, there’s a lot of buzz. But it doesn’t always reflect the daily reality of programmers.Should you move to serverless? Is GraphQL the answer to your API woes? Should you follow the latest DevOps playbook to increase your system reliability? In the world of tech tools, there’s a lot of buzz. But it doesn’t always reflect the daily reality of programmers."

My approach - I could not care less about what FAANG does. Due to their scale and org structure they are solving problems which 99% of mere mortal businesses will never face. I am not a luddite and am constantly looking for new things that can make my development easier. But I consider those from ROI point of view as I am vendor with clients and I want to make money, not waste it. Coolness factor, fashion, corporate propaganda / indoctrination mean zilch to me.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#13

Post by bloodyplonker22 »

I use MongoDB, Cloudflare, Snowflake, and Datadog and I love them all because they are all great and easy to use products that get the job done and make it easy for other developers to collaborate as well. People will mock me mercilessly for not using free OSS, but guess what, I don't want to deal with the headache of setup and maintenance! These products all have their parallels at big companies (such as Borgmon and Bigtable), but they're much better in practical use cases in non gigantic companies.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#14

Post by dham »

ctvo wrote: post #4

Who is trying to switch to GraphQL? Especially for service to service, internal calls?

Unfortunately a lot of companies right now. Although the smart ones have already done the switch and are now trying to switch off.

I've seen a lot of suspect technologies in my career but GraphQL is definitely the worst

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#15

Post by bob1029 »

alberth wrote: post #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%.

We've been using SQLite for 100% of our data persistence needs for the last ~5-6 years now. Our largest single environment is probably getting close to 500gb total size. Hundreds of concurrent users are no problem for us, even without these enhancements (we use WAL currently).

The biggest single trick I learned was to use 1 sqlite connection instance for the entire lifetime of the application. You can add orders of magnitude more throughput with this path. SQLite serializes writers by default so dont duplicate the effort. You can even use the RETURNING keyword to grab insert keys without needing to lock over LastInsertRowId.

We also are close to 100% of business logic being executed via SQL queries as well.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#16

Post by LAC-Tech »

IME most small software companies could be run off SQLite, a $5 linux VPS, vanilla JS, and a single line deploy script. (Pieter Levels seems like the master at this)

I'd never bother suggesting it though:

- no one likes being told they're small when they think they're big

- it's bad for devs careers (Resume-Driven Development)

- as TFA points out - it's not what FAANG are doing so I'd lack legitimacy

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#17

Post by valyagolev »

amw-zero wrote: post #3
recursivedoubts wrote: post #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.

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

I absolutely agree with your comment and I’m sad that it’s being downvoted.

Thing is, I see all the times web frameworks that would be used in those cases, but improve in many directions almost irrelevant for it. Performance? Ability to do same webapps in yet another boring scripting language? Very specific and rigid abstractions and fancy tools that provide for very little flexibility? Fancy reactive approaches that manage to turn the codebase inside out, create hard and undebuggable problems out of the easy ones, and sometimes provide random subset of guarantees of various degrees of usefulness (I’m actually a fan of FRP, just not the misuse of it)?

Somehow Django, with its clear admin system and other out-of-the-box QoL modules remains as close to the most practical and useful approach as one can imagine. (Still even people who use it manage to reimplement its parts for no reason. Every sufficiently big webapp contains a bad, buggy, incoherent implementation of 90% of Django)

There are incredible amounts of money and effort and time to be solved by creating frameworks and abstractions that help with the glorious use-case of “huge, annoying, evolving in all the wrong directions essentially CRUD app”. Yet we’re not even stuck with Django - I see webdev regressing into horrifying piles of JS…

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#18

Post by alberth »

bob1029 wrote: post #15
alberth wrote: post #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%.

We've been using SQLite for 100% of our data persistence needs for the last ~5-6 years now. Our largest single environment is probably getting close to 500gb total size. Hundreds of concurrent users are no problem for us, even without these enhancements (we use WAL currently). The biggest single trick I learned was to use 1 sqlite connection instance for the entire lifetime of the application. You can add orders of m…

That’s great to hear.

Would you mind sharing how you implement/use 1 connection?

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#19

Post by bjterry »

99% feels like an exaggeration. I've talked to many developers from non-FAANG companies, and it isn't at all uncommon for them to be using GraphQL or serverless. I guess there is some selection bias since they are usually applying to a unicorn, so they are probably more likely to come from environments that fit the "1%".

Whether this distinction is relevant to you depends on where you sit. If you are a startup selling developer tools, by all means think about the 99% developers, but also know that a lot of them are in environments that don't spend a lot on tools and are averse to exploring new technologies. If you are a developer in one of these environments, well, the standard advice on Hacker News is already "You're not Google."

I feel like some of this is a bit fatalistic. The 99% can follow a DevOps playbook if they realize its value, and it's cheaper to have DevOps than to not have DevOps, in the anything-more-than-short timeframe. The 99% can certainly have test coverage standards for new code. Somehow, we moved from a world where the 99% didn't use source control, and now they do! Some technologies and practices are so impactful, you should aspire to them no matter what you're environment is (e.g. code review, CI/CD).

The 99% concept also hides a lot of important details, as it's defined by exclusion. The choices you need to make for an early stage startup, a mature WordPress shop for small businesses, and a legacy mainframe team in a F50 are as different from each other as they are from FAANG.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#20

Post by bob1029 »

alberth wrote: post #18
bob1029 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been using SQLite for 100% of our data persistence needs for the last ~5-6 years now. Our largest single environment is probably getting close to 500gb total size. Hundreds of concurrent users are no problem for us, even without these enhancements (we use WAL currently). The biggest single trick I learned was to use 1 sqlite connection instance for the entire lifetime of the application. You can add orders of m…

That’s great to hear. Would you mind sharing how you implement/use 1 connection?

I would just think of it as 1 global static SQLiteConnection instance. There's really not a whole lot to it. Like 4 lines in a class file to set this up.
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