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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

> I spent a lot of time figuring out how to render 200k+ lines of log output without crashing. This led to optimizations deep in our virtual terminal rendering library...

Interesting. I have two wildly different takes on this.

1) Dagger is such an interesting company that they let developers do whatever they want, as long as it works and works well. A good mix of pragmatism and fun.

2) Holy crap, it's a real company with real customers. Why would they attempt something like this in one of their key products, where are the adults?!

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The adults would make a quarterly plan, schedule 16 hours of meeting each week, 4x the head count and put everyone into a silo. And then nothing gets done except next quarter.

Is it? What if instead it was another “We did a full rewrite and it was a mistake. Here is why” type of postmortem?

I could have been, but it wasn't so far. And even if it was, there is a lot of things to learn in such mistakes. Audacity of doing the ambitious thing and the newly gained experience of why not doing it is how we get experienced people in the industry. Otherwise it's just dogma and nobody breaks past the established practices, which are always suboptimal.

Sure, if you're like uber at the peak of over-hiring and have hundreds of engineers more than you actually need. Then go ahead and try to reinvent things and hopefully you'll be able to improve the status quo.

But if you claim to be a small team that needs to ship fast, I believe you should just pick the industry standard boring technology and grind away.

Exactly. People only look at success.

The question is to fully see (and boringly like the parent post was talking about) what are the rewards and the risks to decide if it is worth it or not. What if it made the company tanked financially (like you would have to go back to the state before but have to rewrite the rewrite because you had to change the database design in your first rewrite or something) and not be able to ship for another 6 months? Being a small team you don't have all the cash you want unless you already made it big. Also you have to explain to your investors why you won't ship. And really how come you are an expert in tech when you had to redo it from scratch so next time maybe they can reinvest.

This type of decision needs clear planning, reward and risk, and a real business goal to happen. But let's be real many times it's not the case and X is the new cool tech. I am all about being audacious but in a calculated way.

To me what they did looks exactly that -- being audacious in a calculated way that benefited them.

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