> Do you want to know how popular systems are actually built, from the inside, or do you want carefully groomed triumphal announcements of new, perfectly-formed

> Do you want to know how popular systems are actually built, from the inside, or do you want carefully groomed triumphal announcements of new, perfectly-formed features? IMO both this and "announcements of new, perfectly-formed features" are at the same level (if not lower, because a new feature is still something new). Both are essentially marketing with no technical content that's really worth your time. Except that it's now the third iteration of "we did an obviously questionable thing and replaced it with another questionable solution". > it's better to relay what the team is actually doing, "warts" and all. We ranked on HN a few weeks ago with a post about user-mode WireGuard that was basically a litany of engineering mistakes, and it's one of the things I've most enjoyed writing. I can agree with that, but I wouldn't bunch your writeup into the same group. That's some pretty decent technical content about the problems that were encountered. Meanwhile in these writeups what were the problems? "JSON file database too slow", "Hand-rolled software has to be maintained in-house"? > Every serious product gets built the way Tailscale is describing. You start some components with the simplest thing that can reasonably work, and see how far you can take them. The JSON file Tailscale used to use was one of the most interesting and valuable things they wrote about. Yet they keep changing it, migrating, writing tests for the new code and writing blog posts. The time all these things take even if the size of the new code is less than 100 lines is substantial.