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Sorry if I gave you the impression that all I've done is set up toy websites. In your list, just in the past year, I've touched a solid 80%, if not more, of the

Sorry if I gave you the impression that all I've done is set up toy websites. In your list, just in the past year, I've touched a solid 80%, if not more, of the technologies you listed, professionally. The only ones I'd leave out are database sharding, connection pooling, redis, project management... and I think that's it. That's kind of my point. This stuff isn't hard and oftentimes the things you mentioned are the big obvious solution, because a million people have done it before and blogged about it. That's not to say it isn't really cool. ad hoc multiprocessing with rabbit (or whatever) & celery is awesome. Sass is neat, etc., etc. But by and large they're solved problems. That doesn't make them unworthy of anyone's time, or stupid or dumb or whatever. I didn't say the tech stack is shallow; I said the problems you try to solve on the web are solved by and large, except at the edges where companies like Twitter, Disqus, etc., are doing new things to scale. There are people out there who collect spoons. They have an enormous wealth of knowledge about all kinds of spoons. There is practically a bottomless pit of knowledge about spoons. Their history, origins, etc. That doesn't make it interesting to everyone, necessarily.

Pewpewarrows 15y ago
That was partially my point. It doesn't matter if you're doing systems engineering, high frequency finance trading, web development, games development, database systems creation, mobile app development, or working with embedded systems. Most of the problems you run into are solved. But when you work with any of these fields at length, new and largely unsolved problems crop up. That's not unique to people working on cache systems. Whenever you're in a field that runs into scaling/performance issues (which is all of them), you run into hard problems. If you were to do a 180 and go into a job building database engines instead of web sites, guess what? Most of the stuff you deal with has been blogged about, answered on StackOverflow, and is generally a solved problem. Where does it break down into tough programming? Making it perform bleeding fast. Same goes for web development, and games, and so on. It might _seem_ like web development is more trivial than the rest, but that's just a common misconception.
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  I know for a fact web dev isn't trivial and didn't intend to imply it is.

Pewpewarrows 15y ago

That was partially my point. It doesn't matter if you're doing systems engineering, high frequency finance trading, web development, games development, database systems creation, mobile app development, or working with embedded systems. Most of the problems you run into are solved. But when you work with any of these fields at length, new and largely unsolved problems crop up. That's not unique to people working on cache systems. Whenever you're in a field that runs into scaling/performance issues (which is all of them), you run into hard problems. If you were to do a 180 and go into a job building database engines instead of web sites, guess what? Most of the stuff you deal with has been blogged about, answered on StackOverflow, and is generally a solved problem. Where does it break down into tough programming? Making it perform bleeding fast. Same goes for web development, and games, and so on. It might _seem_ like web development is more trivial than the rest, but that's just a common misconception.

mattdeboard 15y ago
I know for a fact web dev isn't trivial and didn't intend to imply it is.