A discussion that keeps recurring on HN is how you can get a lot done with simple, boring solutions. This is a perfect example of that in practice. What’s the simplest thing that’ll work? Do that, monitor the solution, and when you start hitting a limitation reevaluate what the next appropriate solution is.
There are plenty of comments here deriding this as insanity when we have established best practices, but “best practices for me are not necessarily best practices thee”.
People aren’t perfect, not every engineer comes fully-formed grokking the industry’s best solutions and their trade offs.
This is what learning looks like. This is what an evolving system looks like. And this is how valuable software gets built every day.
Who gives a fuck about scalability on a poc? “Let’s just put in a json file”. I Love it. Personally I start at the “use SQLite” step and go from there because SQLite is such amazing software. Thanks to this post I’m excited to try out Lifestream.
You might rightly point out that Tailscale isn’t a side-project/poc anymore. But that’s exactly why they’re changing to SQLite and writing this post; this is their team learning to deal with larger problems and changing needs, and they’re sharing that journey with us.
As long as they’re not _ignoring_ serious risks let them experiment. But try not to get too upset if they’re making different risk/effort trade-offs than you would. Even if it’s “objectively” the “wrong” thing.
My rubric for technical sanity is:
- are you taking (and testing) backups?
- is your infra/data secure?
- are you monitoring what’s happening?
- can you recover from catastrophic failure in a acceptable time frame?
- are you meeting your legal obligations?
Cover those needs and you can be forgiven a lot suboptimal/experimental implementation details.
A discussion that keeps recurring on HN is how you can get a lot done with simple, boring solutions. This is a perfect example of that in practice. What’s the simplest thing that’ll work? Do that, monitor the solution, and when you start hitting a limitation reevaluate what the next appropriate solution is.
There are plenty of comments here deriding this as insanity when we have established best practices, but “best practices for me are not necessarily best practices thee”.
People aren’t perfect, not every engineer comes fully-formed grokking the industry’s best solutions and their trade offs.
This is what learning looks like. This is what an evolving system looks like. And this is how valuable software gets built every day.
Who gives a fuck about scalability on a poc? “Let’s just put in a json file”. I Love it. Personally I start at the “use SQLite” step and go from there because SQLite is such amazing software. Thanks to this post I’m excited to try out Lifestream.
You might rightly point out that Tailscale isn’t a side-project/poc anymore. But that’s exactly why they’re changing to SQLite and writing this post; this is their team learning to deal with larger problems and changing needs, and they’re sharing that journey with us.
As long as they’re not _ignoring_ serious risks let them experiment. But try not to get too upset if they’re making different risk/effort trade-offs than you would. Even if it’s “objectively” the “wrong” thing.
My rubric for technical sanity is:
- are you taking (and testing) backups?
- is your infra/data secure?
- are you monitoring what’s happening?
- can you recover from catastrophic failure in a acceptable time frame?
- are you meeting your legal obligations?
Cover those needs and you can be forgiven a lot suboptimal/experimental implementation details.