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> JVM and .NET runtime

Maybe I'm too caught up in startup-land, as I haven't touched these tools in a long time. The debugging tools and IDE support on these platforms have always been great.

The Visual Studio install time, the huge frameworks, slow start time, bad package managers, were such killers for productivity.

> isn't a black box of magic

Referring mostly to the query planner - you have no control over it, and you have to dive deep to figure out why it's making certain plans, and how it collects statistics to make these calls. Plus the planner essentially gives up at 6+ joins.

> quite flawed for modern web apps

Try listening to updates on a query.

My guess is ADHD people are drawn to the software industry. Open source is probably fueled by it. It’s a spectrum and I think a lot more people are on the spectrum than they realize.

It’s a constant pursuit for new stuff. Sometimes this can be good, but other times it’s just new for the sake of being different.

I think the minions are surprisingly to blame for a lot of the problems with tech. The tech debt excuse is of our own doing.

I found a similar thing with Node.js. There are tons of under maintained packages while everyone moved to Go and Rust.

A lot of packages you never care what’s underneath if they are maintained and do the job. But when you have to manually patch something and it’s a pile of crap underneath then it sucks.

I much prefer to write things myself if I can now instead of using an existing package or framework. Having my own simple packages in my monorepo that I can instantly change is far better than new third party packages.

I start to wonder if checking in third party modules is the way to go.

> set of opinions about stack

The stack doesn't exist today. It could have if we didn't jump so quickly to new technology and all these different prog languages.

I've just never heard someone pitch new tech with: "easy to debug and change". It's always: look at this contrived example with some new esoteric feature.

Serverless in the way we do it today is the best example of something that is impossible to debug.

Every choice people have to make in tech today comes with this crazy tradeoff of where you get some benefit like scalability, but then it becomes impossible to debug or change.

What's crazy about modern tech is that we've created a world where its so difficult to change things that its analogous to building pipes under asphalt roads. You have to spend all night with a construction crew digging up the road just to change a small thing, and then you have to put it all back again. Except that we work with digital stuff (any physical stuff is completely abtracted) where we can theoretically change anything instantly. The fact that we use shipping container analogies is ironic, if you've ever seen how long shipping loading/unloading and transport actually takes. We need to get back to the computer as the bicycle of the mind...at the moment it is not.

I think we will look back on this era of tech as we do to the era of the secretary on the typewriter...and laugh at the inefficiency.

Relational dbs are based on relational model. It’s a giant black box of magic. And it’s magic is based on a bunch of constraints to make the relational algebra work. It’s really quite flawed for modern web apps.

Try streaming updates to a query without polling…which is essentially all web apps.

It’s fundamentally the wrong approach and people don’t realize. The relational model is good for analytics.

Think about how often you need to know the internals or you have to debug perf by trying to get a black box to do what you want.

Devs should be a layer deeper.

Even monorepos are not perfect for evolving to microservices. It’s incredibly hard to refactor generally. We still lack good monorepo tooling. Tests take huge amounts of time to run. Multiple languages becomes painful especially ones with slow compile speed like Rust.

Someone needs to make a programming language that encourages you to write code that can be easily split and recombined. Something that can do remoting well.

Agreed re: jvm and .net.

It’s easy to imagine a resurgence in the future.

Is jvm pg and k8s boring enough?

K8s is overkill. Jvm is heavy. Pg is fine but relational dbs generally suck.

The whole industry is stupid at this point. I don’t think anyone knows what they are doing. Everyone just wants to play with the new shiny thing. Half the engineers probably have ADHD which leads to this behavior of seeking novelty.

Everyone is obsessed with their shitty stack they used at their last company, and this shit will keep going on and on.

The only things that matters is how easy is something to debug and to change. Think about how often you have heard that as any kind of priority. So many shitty decisions would be avoided if people started thinking about that.

Initially I wanted Ukraine to kick Russia’s ass. Nothing else mattered. It was just so unprovoked and unfair. I wanted Europe to act sooner and faster.

But then I lost interest in the conflict and stopped following it daily like I think many others did and was able to view it from a realistic unemotive standpoint.

What is obvious like in all conflicts is that everyone will be friends again. Look at the atrocities Germany committed and Germans are now friends with everyone.

WW2 was against an evil racist ideology which had to be destroyed.

Russia is a kleptocracy run by one guy. When he dies it’s over. They will liberalize. It seems quite obvious.

A deal should have been struck to give Putin some territory. Instead we get bloodshed cheered on by the world which really has no skin in the game. It’s a spectator sport. And Ukrainian lives are being used to wear down Russia for everyone’s benefit.