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The State of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

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Re: The State of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a ridiculous statement. "I'm sorry" is not an indication of negativity. Nor is it indicative of my posting history. Apparently criticism is simply not allowed. Sorry to poke the fluff that is somehow being perceived as value. You most definitely can judge someone's technical prowess as well based on their decisions. I am not sure how you're going to grey-wash this into some kind of innocent mistake. The decisi…

> Apparently criticism is simply not allowed. Sorry to poke the fluff that is somehow being perceived as value. Your original comment suggested this person mis-understood a foundational principle of software development. I, and I suppose many others, have been reading Hacker news since before we were senior engineers. So its not being "perceived" as having value; by your own admission, it is full of value (for a larg…

I like how a very forthright question has been met with utterly ridiculous characterizations of what was stated. I didn't say "how did you ever get hired." I specifically mentioned the lead/CTO aspect. It's a crudely constructed sentence that should result in a struggle to interpret any other way.

My comment then was meet with trivialities, outlandish statements, and generally nitpicking of tiny parts of my posts. And it appears that because they simply took a position seemingly contradictory (in the lightest sense of the word) to mine, they have been spared any amount of criticism despite significantly diminishing any hope of constructive conversation. Quite honestly, if I had simply ignored these responses there'd be far less noise and general non-sense. My question was not a top level post, it was specific to what was stated and based on one other comment the OP made in the same thread. It's not complicated to respond to nor to understand the motivations of.

Based on his comments, both the lead of the project and the CTO chose an entire stack for their product after seemingly one hackathon, maybe even hosted by Meteor itself.

I am sure the industry doesn't need to have a conversation about how huge amounts of capital are being used at various companies, with people who lack the experience (or sometimes, and not necessarily in this case, intelligence) to make such decisions, all while giving marching orders to who knows how many engineers under them. And again, this type of problem and others like it are something that the industry as a whole has plenty of talent do deal with and appropriately handle. So, how did this non-sense of picking this shiny new toy come about? How did he become lead? Which is why my question was asked. This isn't some isolated incident. I see it far too often, especially professionally.

Oh and let's not forget this is all on a post about the schism between development motivations in the Meteor community.

Calling me a troll for not using an endearing tone and having a question that is part of a larger conversation on the state of the tech industry is maddening. That being said, this is clearly not the right audience, especially using the responses as benchmark, so I'm dropping it and sticking with "just ignore everyone but OP" after this.

Re: The State of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

#142

I'm sorry, but how are you in a lead position but somehow didn't understand a timeless principle of software development?

This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Substantive criticism is fine, but potshots—like rubbing someone's nose in a mistake—are not. The signs of a substantive criticism are that it is respectful and teaches the reader something.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10937969 and marked it off-topic.

Re: The State of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

#143
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RethinkDB is still a strong possibility as an alternative, it's similar enough to MongoDb. While there is no official core SQL support yet there are 3rd party add ons for PostgreSQL and MySQL available.

There are no Postgres or Mysql add-ons for Meteor that are actively maintained or even close to production ready. Hopefully you can prove me wrong on this, but I've looked and have only found preview releases and alpha quality packages.

This looks promising https://github.com/jordangarside/Meteor-GraphQL-PostgreSQL-D...

Re: The State of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

#144

There does not seem a day to go by without a NodeJS-based framework/library get the heat from the community ever since December 2015. It appears that 2016 is the year when the hype from NodeJS died down and vendors/OSS-community must now deal with the hard, un-glamorous, work to clean up, maintain, prepare roadmap, and so on. Which is good! Or it could also be the year where people realized that the use-case for Node…

> Or it could also be the year where people realized that the use-case for NodeJS is fairly very very specific/niche (unless if they love JS so much that they're willing to absorb the pain using NodeJS + its ecosystem).

I disagree with this point... I think Node is very versatile and solid. I dont see anything niche about it. It does very few basic jobs well, 1) providing a good package system (NPM) and 2) giving us javascript on the backend. I feel like people think that just because Node is associated with Javascript that its inherently bad.

Re: The State of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

#145

We used meteor at my last company. By far and away the biggest issue was being stuck with Mongo. NoSQL databases have their place. But they are not a universal solution to everything (or even most things). Relational DBs exist for a reason. Being stuck with Mongo is the major reason why I wouldn't use meteor again. The other stuff was minor and had solutions. We also built an open source library that wrapped up colle…

Yeah this might be one of the biggest complaints about Meteor, and is definitely valid. It's being worked on actively!

Re: The State of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then Meteor does not meet your use case. Some people actually like opinionated, monolithic frameworks because it reduces decision fatigue and boilerplate coding. For small teams with outsized requirements, it's a perfect fit. I've built a couple (internal) apps with Meteor and got a tremendous amount done in a short time. Maybe someday I will need to replace 'x' with 'y' and have a hard time (or maybe not), but the t…

> but the time savings now are worth the technical debt that I might face in the future Oh, man that statement makes me cringe. Have you ever replaced a piece of proprietary technology with a different one before? I promise you, you will consider this decision up front much more closely next time.

It's easier to rewrite something than it is to produce an MVP that consumers and investors want to buy into. I'm 150% into the anti-monolith approach for serious scale, but meteor is like Rails in the respect that small teams can accomplish rapid prototyping and fast iterations early on.

Re: The State of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I completely fail to understand why some developers seem to be allergic to learning about data structures and the means of query-ing them I'm not a fan of Meteor's dependency of Mongo either, but proper database architecture for a rDBMS is not an obvious skill. Even with an ORM (Rails/Django), it still takes care to set up PK/FK relationships and that's not necessarily taught in a CS curriculum. Mongo would be suff…

I might be speaking to a sparse audience here, but I don't come from a CS curriculum. I'm a violinist and a music theorist who happens to have learned enough to make a better living by writing code. I don't know what gets taught in CS degree plans. But I will say that if I can learn how to model, query, and display data, then pretty much anyone can. Especially those with the benefit of a CS degree. I don't use an ORM…

The latest version of Mongo added support for document validation on insert/update.

https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/document-validation/

Re: The State of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

#148
post #67

I loved meteor. Was committed to it for 6/7 months while still learning JS (and working on ember and rails projects with others). I knew it was a risky decision, but it seemed like a good choice for making it as a one-man dev agency. For me, there's no stack selection problem, for me, the main problem is the co$t of launching a working demo-app or a prototype. The only thing i wanted was a simpler/cheaper way of depl…

You must have missed it, the individual developer galaxy hosting is out. I am using it, its amazing. $13 per month per container. Its not the cheapest ($5 D/O wins there) however so far I have found it to be fantastic! They take care of all the nuts and bolts behind the curtain. You just deploy with a single command in console and it uploads, builds a new container, migrates active sessions, tears down the old container.

Re: The State of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

#149

The thing which prevented me to use meteor for big projects is it looks really monolithic from the outside. What happens if suddenly I want to rewrite part of the back-end or part of the front-end with something else for various reasons ? What happens if I want to switch from MongoDb to RethinkDb or Postgres for some reason ? It's good to have default choices but it looks from the outside that the default choices wit…

> What happens if I want to switch from MongoDb to.. Postgres.. The default choices with meteor are pretty fixed This is exactly the reason I'm not using meteor - and it's not so much wanting the ability to switch backends as knowing in advance I want to use an SQL database like Postgres, and not Mongo. With meteor, it's Mongo or nothing. I believe SQL integration is on their roadmap, but I think now it's too late. Y…

Query subscription is the reason. You can add a monitor to the equivalent of "select * from docs" in mongodb and get notified by the db when a docs row is inserted. Some RDBMS:es can solve the same task ad-hoc using triggers, but it is not the same and is much more resource intensive. That makes it hard to achieve Meteor's goal of "any data change is immediately reflected in all clients" with any db other than mongodb.

Re: The State of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

#150

I can sympathize greatly. I played around a bit creating an isomorphic "framework for frameworks" to explore some techniques I didn't get to use in my day-to-day. There is a constant tension between leaky abstractions and expressing functionality meant to run in very different environments that I personally am taking years to fully grok [0]. Of course, unlike the meteor folks, I'm doing it for fun, so there is no pre…

Off topic but is there a reason I keep seeing this word 'grok' used all over HN? Just say 'understand' unless there's a reason to sound like you have aspergers. And 'fully grok' is redundant anyhow - grok implies a full and deep low level understanding with no lapses, you cannot partially grok something. It's dissapointing to see uncommon words used in poor ways, I'm seeing this word misused all over HN as if its now…

The more correct way to say "fully grok" would be "grok in fullness," anyhow. It is possible to grok but not in fullness; Valentine Michael Smith said this once in the book ("I grok but not in fullness").

I'd say it's been live jargon ever since Stranger came out, jumping from SF to the tech world as things often do, and I'm pleased to see it survive despite the modern distaste for Heinlein in many (but not all) SF circles.

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