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chriszhu12

19 karma · joined May 23, 2015

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chriszhu12··on GoodJob – a Postgres-based ActiveJob back end for Ruby on Rails
Another small thing to consider: Adding redis to your stack adds a new failure mode. A service I built a while ago was running on Heroku where Redis add-ons aren't cheap, and our Redis would always running against memory limits, which would cause our entire service to fail.

Meanwhile, 250GB Postgres server has been churning along no problem.

Also, conceptually, architecture where state = DB, and business logic = web server is generally easier to reason about during service migrations and such.

If you don't use ActionCable which I think is the other core feature that relies on Redis, being able to remove it would've saved me a lot of early morning firefighting.

chriszhu12··on Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5
I've been following this project for 5 years now, and I've really hoped it would take off. However, part of what made (and to some extent, still makes) the Rails framework so great is the surrounding ecosystem of well supported gems that makes building tedious things a breeze.

I built a few things in Phoenix in the past, and while the core framework is very simple and elegant to use, I recall having to write my own file uploading library because the one that existed had almost no documentation. This made me really hesitant to adopt Elixir / Phoenix stack for any projects I'm serious about.

I was hoping there was a world where most of the old rails community moved onto phoenix, but in the time this project has been around, it seems the backend web stack has really fragmented into a multitude of Node, Go, python, etc, while Phoenix hasn't really grown its mindshare.

For former Rails / Django devs who has made the switch: what are your thoughts on this?

chriszhu12··on Show HN: Every Coding Comic I’ve made so far ️
Looks great! You should make these into a calendar
chriszhu12··on Study: Staying off Facebook can make you happier
Maybe its not so much getting off Facebook as it is a change in lifestyle.

I'm curious if someone conducted a study to see the effects of a group of people who have never used facebook use it extensively for a week. Maybe their happiness levels also increase.

chriszhu12··on The Problem with the Node community
Yeah, I've been guilty of advocating for Rails for nearly every task when I first started out but it seems much more prevalent in the beginners node community. The fact about the SQL vs NoSQL thing seems to be a controversial one, but I think SQL databases provide a good set of tools of all the concepts that are needed to create a working data store. Primary keys, foreign keys, ACID compliance, etc. The fact that they are absent from NoSQL just means you, as a developer has to implement it yourself.
chriszhu12··on The Problem with the Node community
Original Author here, I agree that it while it could be argued that express/mongo is more "fundamental" or low level than a stack like rails + mysql, I'd also argue that because its lower level, it could act as a barrier to learning. Having to wire together a database adapter with an ORM before being able to save data seems like a tall task to someone just starting out.
chriszhu12··on The Problem with the Node community
Original author here, I agree the depths of abstraction in CS are endless. But in todays day and age, it seems like SQL has matured enough to be learnt without too much background in CS