Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I found that odd. I do worry that many people use technologies because other people working at a completely different scale or in a completely different domain have hit a ceiling which wouldn't really apply to most people. They are convinced to start with a more complex and more difficult technology that's solving problems they are unlikely to be facing any time soon.

1. NoSQL <> traditional RDMS because of scaling/sharding

2. Angular <> jQuery (or anything similarly lightweight) because of the issues around huge complex webapps

3. 'Fast' languages <> 'nice' languages ( ;-) ) because of performance concerns

4. Static typing <> Dynamic typing because of maintainability across large teams.

5. Docker/Microservices etc <> traditional architectures because of... I really have no idea...

So I guess the degenerate case is some poor chap learning web development who decides to write their Pet Store as an angular app with a Scala API backed by Mongo and Solr deployed to a Kubernates cluster ;-)

My friend was brought in by a client after the previous contractor had spent 300+ hours coding a simple organizational website - here is who we are, here is our phone number - using node.js. I doubt the website will ever see more than 20 concurrent visitors.

It's probably featured in the Previous Contractor's portfolio though.

Even still, that's just the completely wrong technology to use for something like this regardless of scale. It sounds like it's literally static content. Just write an HTML file directly if it's a single page, or use something like `Assemble` to get easily re-usable partial support if you have multiple pages that want to share a header and footer or something.

It was 5-10 pages. Static content. Yeah, even if they had 10k concurrent users node.js would have been the wrong technology.

That's not exactly the way I think of it. I try to be pragmatic about my tech choices, even if I might be wrong at times.

To pick on your NoSQL example. There was one project where I had a large set of records which were all JSON in a text file. There was no one set structure for it. Attempts to set up proper MySQL tables for these records didn't work out so well. It was only after the pain of trying that I decided that MongoDB made more sense for this "collection of documents".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com