The Number One Trait of a Great Developer

Further, with a high-performance web framework, foregoing resilience (not recommended, but just for argument's sake) a single web-application instance should be able to handle a much larger number of users as well.

But all of this isn't really relevant to the point made by the OP. He's just using these fictional data points as an illustration. Although I am personally in favor of using examples that are more representative of reality, I think we can mostly ignore the fictional data points to appreciate his point.

But if I had to take over a project from someone, to maintain it, I'd MUCH RATHER have it be done using those technologies than MySQL and Sinatra. Yikes!

I recently had to make a bid on a project that would give the users the ability to share their works, produced in an embedded environment, with their communities - a "Cloud" for the users. I designed the system architecture of the embedded system to be as self-maintainable as possible, and as simple as possible. Since its an embedded OS environment that the users would be using, instead of writing code I integrated such tools as git, and designed a system topology that would allow the user to be shielded from all the git hassle, while still getting a push-button experience.

I lost the gig to someone who decided that it would be better to re-invent "topography ordering" (his words) in a custom MySQL+PHP application, and when I was given an opportunity to challenge his design, I said "great, you're going to re-invent Git, poorly".

He spent the rest of the day "pissed that you compared his project to .. GitHub", which is what he thought I meant when I said "git". Nope, I said "git", I mean "git" - not 'github'. He actually didn't know how to use git.

Either way, off they go .. re-inventing the DAG with MySQL+PHP in an embedded environment, when they could've just wrapped the feature in a git script ... yikes++!

So this article just demonstrates to me that there are a lot of blow-hards out there who just don't get why its so important to apply the NIH principle to themselves, not just others ..

The time before that I tried to incorporate good OO style.

Next time I think I want to incorporate testing. Or maybe I won't feel that the next one is the right time to incorporate it, and instead I'll pick up a new Javascript library.

As devs, we have a remarkable ability to shape a project by choosing which technologies to use. So long as we exercise good judgment, we can learn new things on the job and not have to bet the farm.

As for MySQL / PostgreSQL, that decision probably didn't matter all that much for the given problem. Abstracted over with Sequel, they're pretty much interchangeable until you get to heavy, industrial-scale use. A lot of people can go an entire career without needing to figure out the use case for each.

Because apparently the author didn't have the necessary skills to maintain it. Cassandra isn't easy to master, especially if you only have cheapo developers who are reluctant to switch to PostgreSQL from MySQL.

But yes, it's a highly opinionated, narrow-minded piece.