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It was a joy to work with you as well :) It's a bit harsh but I always feel like Fog Creek might be the cautionary tale in "what happens if you over hire for c
by alexgartrell 3y ago
It was a joy to work with you as well :)
It's a bit harsh but I always feel like Fog Creek might be the cautionary tale in "what happens if you over hire for capability vs. your requirements?" I think that a less capable team would have never landed on the "let's maintain our own programming language" approach w.r.t. Wasabi.
As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right thing to do for the universe, as it butterfly-effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful technical blog posts for the next ten years :p
- kamens 3y agohi alex and ben! in before HN downvotes me
- anildash 3y agohere’s a well-deserved upvote
- alexgartrell 3y agoI still remember when I came to you with my “attachments shouldn’t live in the mssql database” plan and you said “yeah, probably, but doing it any other way would be a million times harder to maintain.” You were 100% right and I think of it often when I encounter someone who is about to do a similar dumb thing for “the right reasons.”
- borski 3y agowait - context? why? i'm sure you're right, as obviously I wasn't there don't have the clearly important context, but why was it 1000000x harder to maintain if attachments didn't live in mssql?
- Throw10987 3y agoNot 100% sure of the rationale in this case. I imagine it might have to do with everyone who runs an instance needs to maintain an additional storage system along with all the associated costs, which is not just storage alone. Databases store stuff really well. If get to the level of needing to configure storage for different tiers of access they can do that, it just takes a bit of work. Of course if your blob data is stored in tables that have OLTP data in them, then you have a bit of work to do to separate it out. This is speaking from recent experience of having to manage random blobs of sensitive data in s3 buckets that engineers have created rather than bothering to put in the main application data store.
- krallja 3y agoThe punchline, I suppose, is that we did switch from MSSQL to Mogile and, eventually, S3. But we still had the code to sometimes store attachments in the DB because that’s how we shipped complete backups to customers!
- toast0 3y agoWith no context, but much experience with databases... Storing attachments as a blob in a database has all sorts of disadvantages I'm sure you're aware of, but it has the major advantage that if you can see the reference to the attachment, you can fetch the attachment. With links to a filesystem, you have to deal with issues like the frontends can't access the files because they're on the wrong system, or the network filesystem is down or .... There's a lot of possibilities.
- gecko 3y agoAs an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right thing to do for the universe, as it butterfly-effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful technical blog posts for the next ten years :p I've never figured out whether that work broke him or was simply his muse, but I also do confess to liking the result. So not a complete loss.
- tedunangst 3y agoI am always happy when I look back on the monobugz days. I think it was a formative experience in evaluating claims like well, of course it works, so many other people already use and depend on it. O RLY?