Pinboard.in blog - Technical Underpinnings | Hacker News Reader

Pinboard.in blog - Technical Underpinnings

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44 pointskylebragger19 comments

"A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I'm excited to play around with something, it probably doesn't belong in production."

That has to be incredibly difficult to adhere to, but doing so probably saves a ton of headaches.

Only difficult, I imagine, if spending time living life is preferable to pulling hair out in heroic acts of troubleshooting / bug fixing.

Since maciej lives in places around the world, it seems like a good rule of thumb.

It must be a very boring life to purposefully work with uninteresting technologies. It may sound selfish, but I'd never make that decision. When I'm interested in what I'm working on, I build a better product. I'll sacrifice a few 9's any day to enjoy my job and make something that's interesting.

You seem to be confusing the tools with the product. Nothing more boring than a brick, but you can build some pretty neat things with them.

My excitement for the tools I use is directly proportional to the excitement I have for a product.

For example: over the past 4 years, I've all but abandoned all of my PHP projects in favor of my Rails projects. Because Rails is far more interesting to me than PHP. Just a small example, but it goes all the way down the chain.

What's even more exciting is making things people want, and use day in day out.

Choosing the right tool for the job is better in the long run than choosing the one you'd enjoy the most.

I think it's probably a pretty sane life, to be honest. There's always some technology that's more interesting than what I'm currently using. The times I'm most productive are the times I haven't worried so much about that and worried more about how efficiently I'm spending my time.

You might be willing to make that sacrifice, but your customers might not.

"favor boring and faded technologies where possible" == our site is held up by tons of shell and perl scripts

And runs on an operating system of ancient '70s design!

The overwhelming part of the codebase is really PHP. There's a small smattering of perl to handle a couple of async tasks, as Maciej described.

I'm currently looking for decent VPS hosting, and am shocked at how cheap prgmr.com are; what have your experiences been like with them?

We just made the switch at the end of last month, so I can't say anything useful. I do like their blog, which gives some insight into what it's like running a service like this.

I like this: "Our technical goals are to never lose data, be very fast, and favor boring and faded technologies where possible."

The quote: "A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I'm excited to play around with something, it probably doesn't belong in production." was what hit me.

I had a sense that this would end up being quoted quite a bit.

Are you afraid by the fact that, later down the road, this architecture of perl scripts may be a burden

I mean, everybody writes shell scripts, but usually the mindset when writing them is "let's get something done" instead of "let's get it done right".

I don't think there's anything inherently hacky about Perl scripts (or any other kind of scripts) if they're in the service of a coherent design.

OT: Is it just me or is that link unzoomable on an iphone?

That's a dumb error on my part, it should be fixed now.

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