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What’s so exciting about Postgres?

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Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#91

Post by jbverschoor »

dkarl wrote: post #67
systemvoltage wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is often downvoted to talk about the "javascript crowd" on HN, but I've worked in software industry long enough to unequivocally and with certainty say that it totally lives up to the cliches. It never gets old to scold people that are not serious, disciplined and principled in their endeavors that affect the rest of the world. Javascript community absolutely deserves the avalanche of criticisms they face. It is t…

It's a stereotype, and like a lot of stereotypes, it has a little bit of statistical truth, but I don't think it does justice for the excellent front-end engineers that do exist and whom I've worked with personally. That said, there is some truth in it. The thing about the back end is that there's no satisfaction in it other than the satisfaction of doing it well and earning the esteem of peers, so most back end deve…

Sorry, but I can’t agree.

Yes, they are capable of making great software, but it’s exactly what gp said... they don’t think. I’ve seen so much code which looks nice from the outside, abd is all structured. But if you start reading, I’m riddled wtfs and questions about why things weren’t done in a more simple concise and stable way.

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#92

Post by systemvoltage »

donw wrote: post #71
edoceo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello fellow "merely competent" engineer. I recommend we both remove "merely" from our title. Inexperience grows from the bottom, I've gotten "better" by simply being too stubborn to get worse. Keep up the mediocre work!

> Inexperience grows from the bottom, I've gotten "better" by simply being too stubborn to get worse. That is quite possibly one of the best quotes I have heard on how to approach discipline in engineering.

I don't understand, can you please explain?

> Inexperience grows from the bottom

In what way?

> I've gotten "better" by simply being too stubborn to get worse

How does one get better by wanting to get worse?

This makes no sense to me.

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#93

Post by systemvoltage »

dkarl wrote: post #67
systemvoltage wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is often downvoted to talk about the "javascript crowd" on HN, but I've worked in software industry long enough to unequivocally and with certainty say that it totally lives up to the cliches. It never gets old to scold people that are not serious, disciplined and principled in their endeavors that affect the rest of the world. Javascript community absolutely deserves the avalanche of criticisms they face. It is t…

It's a stereotype, and like a lot of stereotypes, it has a little bit of statistical truth, but I don't think it does justice for the excellent front-end engineers that do exist and whom I've worked with personally. That said, there is some truth in it. The thing about the back end is that there's no satisfaction in it other than the satisfaction of doing it well and earning the esteem of peers, so most back end deve…

I didn't mean us to be divisive. Backend engineers need good front-end partners to be successful. Front-end engineers depend on the backend folk to not fuck shit up, which happens time and again.

I meant that the developer community, the folks that are at the helm of developing Javascript frameworks (gahhhh!) and other shenanigans, the entire browser based ecosystem just reeks of incompetence, lack of discipline and rigor.

Frontend and Backend engineers should get together and build a better system that serves both well. That's what I meant by asking Postgres core devs to build front-end tools, something like Gemini [1].

[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#94

Post by tinkertamper »

api wrote: post #59
erokar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical bitter backend developer spew. Works with Java or C# and hasn't explored much more than OO and procedural. Threatened by anything new, creative or explorative. Stuck in his ways and prefers to do mundane, uncreative and repetetive tasks, like writing boilerplate to get stuff in and out of a database. Soon to be automated away by serverless.

Ooh, permanent lock in to a single company’s bill by the second mainframe! How exciting!

I see this criticism a lot for serverless but I don’t see it in reality. Serverless is still just running code, the only part that wouldn’t be portable is the entrypoint data structure which is amounts to practically nothing.

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#95

Post by redis_mlc »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #74
treeman79 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MySQL was also a lot faster in the early days. Plus it “just worked” not sanely mind you. But you had a lot less problems with type mismatches, up/downcast, etc. Well unless you wanted quality data. But back then we were just happy that it didn’t bother us with “minor” details.

It was a lot faster, and sometimes the odds that your data might live long enough for those integrity issues to matter seemed very remote. Around 2001, the conventional wisdom was that it was worth the risk to take the performance victory, keep your hosting bill down, use mysql, and build some other approach to data integrity. (If memory serves, the integrity downsides were bigger then, too...) The math is pretty dif…

[flagged]

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#96

Post by nomad543 »

acdha wrote: post #87
redis_mlc wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've even seen a few cases where people had data loss which had either gone unnoticed Maybe under MyISAM, but InnoDB has been the default storage engine since 2010.

Under InnoDB, because we’re not talking about file corruption but cases where MySQL would silently and irreversibly discard data rather than throwing an error. For example, inserting a value which is too large for the target data type - it truncates the value so that value is lost unless you have another copy or way to reconstruct it.

People always criticize MySQL, then when asked what is the problem, they always mention the same thing about column length, which is just a default that can easily be changed and it's not even the default anymore for years.

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#97

Post by edgyquant »

hashtagmarkup wrote: post #90
edgyquant wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Json has nothing to do with the persistence part.

If you need to persistently store frontend state in the backend, would it not be easier to use the native frontend data format? It's not entirely about persistence... it's about the ease and reliability of the persistence.

My point is that that JSON isn’t being delivered via a js db but instead translated from data stored in a database written in C. So the “what about json” gotcha isn’t as good as it was made to seem.

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#98

Post by watermelon59 »

jbverschoor wrote: post #91
dkarl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a stereotype, and like a lot of stereotypes, it has a little bit of statistical truth, but I don't think it does justice for the excellent front-end engineers that do exist and whom I've worked with personally. That said, there is some truth in it. The thing about the back end is that there's no satisfaction in it other than the satisfaction of doing it well and earning the esteem of peers, so most back end deve…

Sorry, but I can’t agree. Yes, they are capable of making great software, but it’s exactly what gp said... they don’t think . I’ve seen so much code which looks nice from the outside, abd is all structured. But if you start reading, I’m riddled wtfs and questions about why things weren’t done in a more simple concise and stable way.

That's my experience too.

Recently had to deal with some Slack bot written in js at work, and my coworkers had to deal with me ranting about that crap for a whole afternoon.

The way I put it was, this code was written in the most complicated way possible, for no apparent reason.

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#99

Post by watermelon59 »

noir_lord wrote: post #39
systemvoltage wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is often downvoted to talk about the "javascript crowd" on HN, but I've worked in software industry long enough to unequivocally and with certainty say that it totally lives up to the cliches. It never gets old to scold people that are not serious, disciplined and principled in their endeavors that affect the rest of the world. Javascript community absolutely deserves the avalanche of criticisms they face. It is t…

I'm seeing this in action now, the difference between the backend code and the frontend code is stark and the backend code isn't up to my standard either (and my standards aren't that high, I know I'm merely competent for many places). It just seems to be the nature of the web side of things, lots of sloppiness. The devs are smart enough, they just don't think and it shows. That or they use something but clearly don'…

> That or they use something but clearly don't understand the thing they are using.

You know, I feel like this has bled into backend development too. And it's not entirely the fault of engineers... or so I like to think, to excuse myself :P

What worries me a lot is that I find myself being one of those people, not being able to fully help my situation.

It's just... too much. It seems like every few months a new thing pops up and everyone suddenly wants to adopt it. And even if you try and resist it because it's not necessary, someone from above (e.g. CTO) will decide that the whole org has to adopt that and now you're screwed.

In a typical backend application you have to deal with:

- Application framework

- Testing framework

- Logging framework

- Metrics framework

- Tracing

- Visualization tool(s) for the three things above

- CI

Which is already quite a bit, but obviously manageable and you could get pretty knowledgeable on all of that if they stay static.

But hey, now your org has to expose every service on gRPC. Ok, one more thing to tack onto your app...

Now everyone has to expose GraphQL endpoints too!

Oh and next month we're migrating to a new metrics solution. Because. Great, let's throw away all the knowledge built on the old one and scramble to migrate to the new things we don't have time to learn fully.

Alright, now let's start writing new services in this new language.

And now everyone has to throw events on this new message bus thing that some team over there built using Kafka!

Finally, let's move everything off of AWS managed services and onto Kubernetes! Yay!

All of that can easily happen within the span of 2-3 years. And in the meantime you have to deal with on-call rotations, customer issues, implementing new features... and if you're a senior dev you're also busy mentoring folks, going to meetings with other teams, etc etc.

You know what I'm talking about, right? Over time, I feel like it's becoming impossible to achieve mastery of anything. There are way too many things to learn to be able to make sense of the whole, and no time to do deep dives on all of them. And then there's all the new stuff that keeps being adopted.

And then things blow up and they're freaking mysterious and when you finally find out what it was, you realize you'd only have been able to catch that problem beforehand if you'd read the freaking source code for some library you adopted.

It's madness. It's pure hell.

Boy I miss working on low level code.

End rant.

Re: What’s so exciting about Postgres?

#100

Post by hashtagmarkup »

edgyquant wrote: post #97
hashtagmarkup wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to persistently store frontend state in the backend, would it not be easier to use the native frontend data format? It's not entirely about persistence... it's about the ease and reliability of the persistence.

My point is that that JSON isn’t being delivered via a js db but instead translated from data stored in a database written in C. So the “what about json” gotcha isn’t as good as it was made to seem.

My point is that JSON is being supported. So the "dismissal of facts" isn't as thoughtful as it was made to seem.
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