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Comment by nomoremongo | Hacker News Reader

Pastebin author here.

Refutations are going to fall into two categories, it seems:

1. Questioning my honesty

2. Questioning my competence

Re #1, I'm not sure what you imagine my incentive to lie might be. I honestly just intended this to benefit the community, nothing more. I'm genuinely troubled that it might cause some problems for 10gen, b/c, again, Eliot & co are nice people.

Re #2, all I can do is attempt to reassure you we're generally smart and capable fellows. For example, these same systems exhibit none of these problems, and we're sleeping quite well through the night, on the new database system they've moved to. I'll omit the name of the database system just so there is no conflict that might undermine my integrity and motives (see #1).

edit:

(also, there are a few comments about "someone unknown/new around here"... trust me, I'm not new or unknown. I'm a regular.)

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So, you've got direct engagement from the CTO above, and plenty of other commentary to consider here, but you dropped back in only to announce that "hey, all dissent falls into 2 convenient buckets, and here are my quick rebuttals to those strawmen"? Really?

If intellectual laziness like that is any indication, I doubt anyone is going to be reassured on your point #2. You've dropped a bomb on 10gen here, and done it anonymously to boot. You've got their people sifting through past issues on a Sunday, and for what? Because you fucked up a project by making poor choices, and probably took the well-deserved heat for it? Nevermind your categories. Man up and respond to these people directly, or don't respond at all.

Some transparency would be appreciated.

- Who are you?

Your HN acct was created 14 hours ago, and it's name is extremely specific to this particular post -- "nomoremongo". Nothing wrong with it, just a little peculiar considering the subject mater.

- Where did you experience these problems?

I guess I could see some issue around revealing where you work, but honestly, that just sucks. It really doesn't have anything to do with questioning your honesty and integrity; it's more about just being open about things. If you're going to be open about your experiences, why not be open about all of it?

Not to be rude, but the anonymous-nature of this post comes off as a bit over-dramatic.

I don't understand why anyone is surprised or bothered that this would be an anonymous post.

Has anyone commenting ever used a piece of software that caused them major problems, while watching others with less experience talk about how great it is? For me, it is beyond my capabilities to refrain from speaking up about it.

His identity does not matter, and it would start a war between people or companies. He is not interested in doing that, and he is not speaking on behalf of a company. There is not really any other way to do it.

Sometimes people need to put information out there but don't want to be personally associated with the information. This is fairly logical, because they are not associated with the information. They just discovered what was already true.

Some are also (fairly) questioning "why the anonymity?", and "where is the evidence?"

Those two things are connected: I can't provide the evidence without revealing identity. And the reason for the anonymity is we still have some small databases with 10gen and a current support contract. I had intended to go public with all this after we had transitioned off the system entirely, but more and more reports have continued to pop up of people having trouble with MongoDB, and it seemed as though delaying would be imprudent. An anonymous warning would be more valuable than saying nothing.

So--if you choose to ignore or dismiss our claims, you're entitled. :-) I still feel satisfied that I did what I needed to do.

Are you willing to reveal your and your company's identity once you're completely off of Mongo?

Yep. I do regret not GPG signing it or something so we could later claim it without more conspiracy theories. But I'll blog about it on an official blog as soon as we're clear of any interest in MongoDB.

Reading this overall thread, I think you didn't have as much of an impact on people's thinking as you'd probably like to. I hope after your company finishes transitioning you do go public on this, with all the specific evidence.

So why are you doing it anonymously?

For me, the post is very helpful---when MongoDB markets itself MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source, document-oriented database. Written in C++... http://www.mongodb.org/

I presume that anyone would post such content anonymously.

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