Hacker News Reader

Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

I don't get to work on databases this size and today has been an incredible lesson and a journey. I've been reading all the comments and blogs, watching the stream and Googling what I didn't know or understand.

I feel like the next step for me is scaling my business so that we have an actual usage for my newly found interests :)

View on HN

Then you end up having deep expertise in a topic that's only important for larger companies. Sometimes this works out well, sometimes it leaves you a little stuck. :)

Oh, there's plenty of demand for skilled DBAs with deep expertise with handling large volumes of data, even at small-to-medium-sized companies. GitLab being one of those companies! In fact, demand for this sort of thing is likely to increase. If it interests you, dig in. You'll never stop learning.

Meh. Just learn, learn, learn. If it isn't completely applicable to your life that's okay. Sometimes there are pearls of wisdom in best practices in field completely unrelated to your own. Learning something new is always a good thing.

THIS ^^^ So much this. I can't tell you how many times I picked up a book or paper thinking "There's no way i'm going to get anything new out of this". As I start reading, I start to find little tidbits of information that make me think in ways I didn't before.

I'm not sure if it's really company size, though there's probably a correlation. My company is only marginally bigger than GitLab in terms of employees (just recently 200+), and we have several dozen databases bigger than this.

This, it depends more on the product and the requirements. I've worked in companies that are just a few employees and are running databases larger than this. I've also worked for a company with ~100 employees whose only 'database' is an in memory cache and a few kilobytes big textfile

Running databases at scale is great - it's what I do for a living, and I wouldn't want to do anything else

But please realize that this is a horrible example. Almost everything done was wrong, technical choices, processes, everything - please don't use it as a positive example.

For those wondering about the live Gitlab stream, you can watch them work here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc0hPGerSd4

That is remarkably transparent. Commendable.

It sounds like a terrible working environment for the sysadmins. When shit is broke, you focus on fixing it. Being on camera is distracting, and setting up the livestream probably takes a bit of time that could be spent on actually fixing the problem.

We had the call live with all engineers and asked if everyone was okay with streaming this.

Someone not involved with helping fixing the problem set up the stream from their home, while we continued work as normal.

I think the overall spirit was that it was comfortable to do it like this. Note that no one was required to work like this and we'd happily stopped streaming if anyone would have any problems with it.

It's both fun and incredibly frustrating at times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com