Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100 • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100

#101

Post by OutOfHere » Sat, Sep 21, 2024, 11:16 AM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #4

At a previous job, there was an argument over a code review where I had done some SQL queries that fixed a problem but were not optimal. The other side were very much "this won't work for 1000 devices! we will not approve it!" whereas my stance was "we have a maximum of 25 devices deployed by our only customer who is going to leave us next week unless we fix this problem today". One of the most disheartening weeks of…

With SQL you really should support 10x your current user count, rounded up to the nearest power of 10. If you have 25 devices, this means you should support 250 rounded up to 1000. If you don't, it will come back to bite you really hard and really quickly. This is just something that you learn from experience.

Obviously I am not talking about an emergency situation, but about planned design.

Re: Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100

#102

Post by fragmede » Sat, Sep 21, 2024, 11:20 AM UTC

jasfi wrote: post #69

ForHackernews wrote: post #26

I dunno, I've lived the other side of this where people made boneheaded choices early on, the product suddenly got traction, and then we were locked into lousy designs. At my last company, there were loads of engineers dedicated to re-building an entire parallel application stack with a view to an eventual migration. A relatively small amount of upfront planning could have saved the company millions, but I guess it w…

More experienced software engineers can usually make the right design decisions that don't mean rebuilding when/if it comes time to scale things. This is usually about avoiding bad decisions because they know better.

In the abstract, it's impossible to judge decisions. What's worse than a company that spending millions on refactoring? Not being able to spend money on that because the company went out of business before launch because the devs were too busy engineering the most perfect, webscale architecture for the system that they weren't able to launch a product before running out of runway.

Re: Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100

#103

Post by JohnBooty » Sat, Sep 21, 2024, 2:56 PM UTC

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #92

JohnBooty wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a Dunning-Kruger effect. You get legitimately talented engineers who are talented enough to do a legitimately hard thing: optimizing a complex piece of code. So, they don't realize that there's kind of another level of understanding beyond that (when to optimize vs. how to optimize) There's also the fact that some people just like optimizing shit for selfish or even slightly nefarious reasons. Some just lik…

I don't know how to exactly classify this, but based on my experience it feels like a certain type of engs who have only been exposed to this type of way of doing things from when they started, like at uni. It's to do with going through certain type of education, after that certain type of enterprisey environment following very strict rules of design patterns and applying these patterns to absolutely everything they…

Yeah. I think formal CS education often does a good job of teaching students to optimize in a myopic way - calculating big-O notation, understanding basic algorithms and data structures etc.

It's also rigid by design and (probably) necessity: students don't typically encounter unknown, unchanging, and evolving constraints and requirements throughout the project. Lastly they are not typically maintaining a medium/large codebase in conjunction with other engineers.

So you tend to get these smart kids don't know when to optimize. They can make a 15-line function "faster" but they don't have a sense of the impact this has on a larger project and they don't know how to weigh the impact of an optimization vs. the effort involved and future complexity it might incur.

The lack of knowledge would be fine on its own, but back to the Dunning-Kruger effect: they typically don't know that they don't know this stuff.

Not sure how you change that at the CS education level, honestly. At the very least you could stress to the kids that in the real world you have conditions and goals much different than in CS classrooms...