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How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#131

Post by sam_lowry_ »

skinkestek wrote: post #115
superasn wrote: post #38

Always use ORMs and then spend the next year debugging N+1 queries, bloated joins, and mysterious performance issues that only show up in prod. Migrations randomly fail, schema changes are a nightmare, and your team forgets how SQL works. ORMs promise to abstract the database but end up being just another layer you have to fight when things go wrong.

People love to rant about ORMs. But as someone who writes both raw SQL and uses ORMs regularly, I treat a business project that doesn’t use an ORM as a bit of a red flag. Here’s what I often see in those setups (sometimes just one or two, but usually at least one): - SQL queries strung together with user-controllable variables — wide open to SQL injection. (Not even surprised anymore when form fields go straight into…

In Java, the sweet spot is JDBCTemplate. Projects based on JDBCTemplate succeed effortlessly while teams muddle through JPA projects.

It is not that JPA is inherently bad, it's just that such projects lack strong technical leadership.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#132

Post by nsksl »

skinkestek wrote: post #115
superasn wrote: post #38

Always use ORMs and then spend the next year debugging N+1 queries, bloated joins, and mysterious performance issues that only show up in prod. Migrations randomly fail, schema changes are a nightmare, and your team forgets how SQL works. ORMs promise to abstract the database but end up being just another layer you have to fight when things go wrong.

People love to rant about ORMs. But as someone who writes both raw SQL and uses ORMs regularly, I treat a business project that doesn’t use an ORM as a bit of a red flag. Here’s what I often see in those setups (sometimes just one or two, but usually at least one): - SQL queries strung together with user-controllable variables — wide open to SQL injection. (Not even surprised anymore when form fields go straight into…

> - Some homegrown “SQL helper” that saves you from writing SELECT *, but now makes it a puzzle to reconstruct a basic query in a database

>- Bonus points if the half-baked data access layer is buried under layers of “magic” and is next to impossible to find.

It’s really funny because you’re describing an ORM perfectly.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#133

Post by ethbr1 »

Tade0 wrote: post #55
superasn wrote: post #38

Always use ORMs and then spend the next year debugging N+1 queries, bloated joins, and mysterious performance issues that only show up in prod. Migrations randomly fail, schema changes are a nightmare, and your team forgets how SQL works. ORMs promise to abstract the database but end up being just another layer you have to fight when things go wrong.

A couple of years ago I had an opportunity to fill a fullstack role for the first time in several years. First thing I noticed was that I couldn't roll an SQL statement by hand even though I had a distinct memory of being able to do so in the past. I went with an ORM and eventually regretted it because it caused insurmountable performance issues. And that, to me, is the definition of a senior engineer: someone who re…

My definition of a senior engineer is someone who can think of most of the ways to do a thing... and has the wisdom to chose the best one, given the specific situation’s constraints.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#134

Post by ethbr1 »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #116
mattmanser wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ORMs are absolutely fantastic at getting rid of the need for CRUD queries and then boilerplate code for translating a result set to a POCO and vide versa. They also allow you to essentially have a strongly typed database definition. It allows you to trivialise db migrations and versioning, though you must learn the idiosyncrasies. What they are not for is crafting high performance query code. It literally cannot resu…

Plenty of tools out here doing plain sql migrations with zero issues. At my day job everyone gave up on attempting to use the awkward ORM dsl to do migrations and just writes the sql. It’s easier, and faster, and about a dozen times clearer. > I don't really understand people who still write basic INSERT statements Because it’s literally 1 minute, and it’s refreshingly simple. It’s like a little treat! An after dinne…

> It’s like a little treat! An after dinner mint!

You completely changed my perspective on simple SQL housekeeping. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qYPW3O6VhXo&t=48s

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#135

Post by BobaFloutist »

dotancohen wrote: post #51
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is self-control in coding just a lost art now? Yes; a lot of people don't code because they need to make something work, they code for the joy of it. When the software they need to write is boring or solved - like another CRUD app, front- or back-end - instead of picking the boring and easy to build and comprehend languages and frameworks, they will make it interesting for themselves. Learn a new language, framewor…

> they will make it interesting for themselves. Engineers love to solve problems. If there are no problems readily at hand, they will create some.

They're kind of like Border Collies that way, aren't they

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#138

Post by bb88 »

sethammons wrote: post #112
Scarblac wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always see this sentiment here but I just havent experienced any of it in 14 years with the Django ORM.

My life is this in django. Querysets have been passed around everywhere and we've grown to 50 teams. Now, faced with ever slower dev velocity due to intertwined logic, and reduced system performance with often wildly non performant data access patterns, we have spent two years trying to untangle our knot of data access, leading to a six month push requiring disruption to 80% of team's roadmaps to refactor to get the…

One thing that's interesting about Django I thought was that tools like celery will "pickle" orm objects, when they really should be passing the pk's of the objects.

The other thing that's interesting about Django is that you can subclass queryset to do things like .dehydrate() and .rehyrdrate() which can do the translations between json-like data and orm representations.

Then replace the model manager (in Django at least) with that queryset using queryset.as_manager().

If you're trying to decompose the monolith, this is a good way to start -- since it allows you an easier time to decompose and recompose the orm data.

The simplest can just be:

    def dehydrate(self) -> List[int]:
        return list(self.values_list("id", flat=True))

    def rehydrate(self, *pks) -> Self:
        return self.filter(id__in=pks)

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#139

Post by skinkestek »

nsksl wrote: post #132
skinkestek wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love to rant about ORMs. But as someone who writes both raw SQL and uses ORMs regularly, I treat a business project that doesn’t use an ORM as a bit of a red flag. Here’s what I often see in those setups (sometimes just one or two, but usually at least one): - SQL queries strung together with user-controllable variables — wide open to SQL injection. (Not even surprised anymore when form fields go straight into…

> - Some homegrown “SQL helper” that saves you from writing SELECT *, but now makes it a puzzle to reconstruct a basic query in a database >- Bonus points if the half-baked data access layer is buried under layers of “magic” and is next to impossible to find. It’s really funny because you’re describing an ORM perfectly.

I don't know what kind of ORM you have used but I probably wouldn't like it either.

My ORM does extremely much more than those "SQL helper" classes and it logs SQL nicely to the console or wherever I ask it to to log.

And it is easy to find it, just search for @Entity.

Re: How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

#140

Post by LanceH »

donatj wrote: post #47

I always get a kick out of the posts from the people in language communities who post "I'm new to , what framework should I use?" It's like asking "I'm new to driving, what brand of nitros should I be using" Nah dude, get your sea legs first

Depends on the language. This one is pretty settled in Ruby.
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