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Most people are simply bad at migrations.
by halbritt 6y ago
Most people are simply bad at migrations.
- cglace 6y agoIf most are bad at migrations then what should most do?
- halbritt 6y agoLearn how to do migrations well. There's plenty of literature on the topic.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoUltimately, building a maintainable system requires that you allow for people being bad. If 10 smart engineers contribute to your system, and they each assume future developers will be good in their own distinct way, the resulting system will be so complicated that none of them are good enough to maintain it.
- halbritt 6y agoPreferably, everything that can be is loosely coupled and extensible.
- gigatexal 6y agoWasn’t Facebook built on MySQL with the friend graph written in relational SQL and PHP? The idea was but out and then perfected later. In my head this is the same as doing it on AWS or GCP fully on their proprietary stack and then once making some coin you start a refactor or a migration in parallel to your own hardware and stack as costs warrant it. Dropbox is famous for doing this when they did their move from S3 to pocket — an in house storage layer they built.
- rcxdude 6y agoIt's not likely your product will have enough financial success to afford the huge amount of engineering effort facebook has put into improving their platform. If your system falls apart before you are making enough off of it to fix it you're going to just run out of runway.
- halbritt 6y agoOr to add to that, there are often very good reasons to optimize well before facebook did. The sheer friction of making the transition to The Right Thing can often be too difficult to overcome.