At a billion-dollar fintech, some engineer thought gRPC is too complicated.
So, he built someything from scratch.
A year later, there was a team of 5 engineers maintaining a half-baked implementation of gRPC. Good for him. Bad for the company.
A year later, there was a team of 5 engineers maintaining a half-baked implementation of gRPC. Good for him. Bad for the company.
But multiply that by a few languages, and now you have to paper over error code and exceptions, signed and unsigned ints, unicode and bytes
Not to mention network errors, retries, throttling, etc.
It tends to grow without bound, mostly because the RPC system tries to do too much. You can't really abstract the network -- that's the #1 lesson
When you try to abstract the network, now you OWN a bunch of problems that you can't solve
In some ways I feel like my impact has been quite boring, in other ways quite vital. But it’s never made me friends with the kind of developers who look sideways at the idea that other peoples life’s work might be better than their 5 year old weekend project.
I still dearly love it. It makes operating a massive MySQL DB that has to deal with terrible queries from an ORM palatable.