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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1702 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 1, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Definitely agree. One of the more challenging parts of my job is having to be the guy who who says, "Okay, you want this app to be HA... but why? If you can justify this to me and tie it to some positive business outcome that merits the extra engineering hours spent, we can do this. Otherwise, no." I've only ever worked on understaffed teams and so I've always had to be extremely judicious when allocating engineering effort. Most ICs want to do this kind of thing because it's cool, or "best practice," or they see it as a career builder/educational opportunity. FWIW in 1:1s I ask what their career growth goals are and actively try to match them with work that will help them progress -- so I'm not entirely unsympathetic to their wishes).

It also just seems a lot easier than it really is. There's the whole Aphyr Jepsen series where he puts a bunch of different distributed databases to the test that everyone knows are supposed to be good and correct and they fall apart miserably. Almost every single one. It's bad enough that people don't really understand the CAP theorem's tradeoffs, but the real world systems are even worse because they can't even live up to what they claim to guarantee.

If you really think your application has outgrown the directory tree of .json files or the SQLite instance, show me how you plan to deal with failures and data consistency issues. It's not trivial and if you think it is I'm not going to let you drive.

or they see it as a career builder/educational opportunity

I feel like this is the unstated rationale for using every single cloud provider's API

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