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I’m going to be really honest, and I mean this critique in the most constructive way possible: this release feels very rushed in terms of documentation, present

by dsacco 9y ago

I’m going to be really honest, and I mean this critique in the most constructive way possible: this release feels very rushed in terms of documentation, presentation and technical limitations. A few observations: 1. You wrote a C++ API for Wallaroo but you’re not “supporting it.” What does this mean? Why provide a C++ API (and therefore appeal to some subset of potential clientele) if you’re not going to support it at all? Further, why do you say you’re “happy to work with you” to C++ users then? 2. Why are you emphasizing Pony at all? You’re not documenting it much and you explicitly state that you only really intend to use that binding internally. That detracts from your core content. 3. Your current limitations are a showstopper for a lot of serious use cases. For example: you can only recover from one worker failing at a time, and you don’t support logging other than print statements? With that out of the way, I want to congratulate you on the release. It’s nice to see more activity in this space, especially without the JVM.

spooneybarger 9y ago
We have plenty to do dsacco. I agree. re: emphasizing Pony, the moderators here on HN changed the title of the post, adding Pony and also redirected it to GitHub repo so, don't have a ton of control over that. The blog post that announces the release specifically talks about the Python API which is what we are initially supporting. re: C++. C++ was our first API but the folks we have gotten traction with aren't those that are interested in using C++. We have limited resources and a lot of work to do, so, the C++ is there and folks can use it if they want but we don't want to mislead people into thinking that it will get the same attention as the Python in terms of features or bug fixes in the near future. In the end with C++, we will pick it up and start working on it more if it can bring in revenue and allow us to grow the team and further enhance the product. At the moment, most of the interest that we are getting is for Python, Python 3, and Go so we are putting an emphasis there. We had to make the hard decision in August that C++ wasn't getting traction and we shouldn't be investing time in that API at this time. Handling multiple concurrent failures will be addressed by the end of the year as will logging. We've put a lot of work into some areas and less into others. You have nicely highlighted a couple that we de-emphasized initially. Thank you for your kind words and congratulations. edit to add a bit more info re: timing on a release. I think that is hard for any project. Whether it has commercial backing or not. In the end, we want to get Wallaroo out there with people, warts and all and get feedback from folks on what features they think are most important. We want to hear from potential users in the space and have them help us prioritize functionality (even more so if they pay us money so we can hire more engineers to speed development).
- dsacco 9y ago
  Thanks for taking the criticism so well! Good luck on the feature enhancements.
  - spooneybarger 9y ago
    I see you are in NYC. A number of us live here as well. If you ever want to get together and talk more, my personal email address is in my profile.
dang 9y ago
> Why are you emphasizing Pony at all? I added that bit because Pony is interesting and under-represented on HN, and it would probably have escaped notice otherwise. It usually doesn't add much value to say "written in X" in a title (e.g. for X in {Rust, Go, JS}) but IMO this is an exception. Edit: since we switched the URL back to the blog post I've taken the Pony away.

by dsacco 9y ago

spooneybarger 9y ago

We have plenty to do dsacco. I agree. re: emphasizing Pony, the moderators here on HN changed the title of the post, adding Pony and also redirected it to GitHub repo so, don't have a ton of control over that. The blog post that announces the release specifically talks about the Python API which is what we are initially supporting. re: C++. C++ was our first API but the folks we have gotten traction with aren't those that are interested in using C++. We have limited resources and a lot of work to do, so, the C++ is there and folks can use it if they want but we don't want to mislead people into thinking that it will get the same attention as the Python in terms of features or bug fixes in the near future. In the end with C++, we will pick it up and start working on it more if it can bring in revenue and allow us to grow the team and further enhance the product. At the moment, most of the interest that we are getting is for Python, Python 3, and Go so we are putting an emphasis there. We had to make the hard decision in August that C++ wasn't getting traction and we shouldn't be investing time in that API at this time. Handling multiple concurrent failures will be addressed by the end of the year as will logging. We've put a lot of work into some areas and less into others. You have nicely highlighted a couple that we de-emphasized initially. Thank you for your kind words and congratulations. edit to add a bit more info re: timing on a release. I think that is hard for any project. Whether it has commercial backing or not. In the end, we want to get Wallaroo out there with people, warts and all and get feedback from folks on what features they think are most important. We want to hear from potential users in the space and have them help us prioritize functionality (even more so if they pay us money so we can hire more engineers to speed development).

dsacco 9y ago
Thanks for taking the criticism so well! Good luck on the feature enhancements.
- spooneybarger 9y ago
  I see you are in NYC. A number of us live here as well. If you ever want to get together and talk more, my personal email address is in my profile.

dang 9y ago

> Why are you emphasizing Pony at all? I added that bit because Pony is interesting and under-represented on HN, and it would probably have escaped notice otherwise. It usually doesn't add much value to say "written in X" in a title (e.g. for X in {Rust, Go, JS}) but IMO this is an exception. Edit: since we switched the URL back to the blog post I've taken the Pony away.