5 ms·

> Page cache doesn't seem too important or interesting in my day to day app and distributed systems development This is why we can't have nice things.

• the_only_law 4y ago
  I love how people say this, when the reality is, all the software from the oh-so-coveted is the biggest shit show I’ve seen. But it’s rarely because some developer didn’t understand page caches, and usually because it obviously didn’t revive enough QA or UX input.
• tshaddox 4y ago
  How so? Isn't the only point of developing these systems and abstractions so that other people don't have to worry about them?
  • chrisandchris 4y ago
    IMHO, today to many people think "don't have to worry about them" equals "don't need to know anything about it".
    • tshaddox 4y ago
      I would argue that in most cases you "don't need to know anything about it" either. It's reasonable to deliberately treat abstractions as if they are not leaky, as long as you're aware that all abstractions in fact are leaky and you're equipped to investigate and learn about them if the leaks cause problems.
      • dotopotoro 4y ago
        “don't need to know anything about it” is acceptable, but should not be encouraged. It’s not like reading 10 bullet points on the subject is “diving deep” and making huge time investment. It’s just getting the minimal context, so later on at least some keywords are known.
        • macintux 4y ago
          10 bullet points on every conceivable computer-related topic is, well, a lot more than 10.
          • dotopotoro 4y ago
            One topic at high level (like in the article, 10-20 minutes?) per week, results in ~50 topics per year. Not sure how many computer related topics you know/want (“The more you know, the more you know you don't know”), but for me, 50 topics on programming seems sufficiently high at frankly a very low effort/commitment.
            • macintux 4y ago
              Fair enough, I’m just not sure how many years would go by before I even thought about SSD performance. Irrelevant to most of my career.
        • tshaddox 4y ago
          > It’s not like reading 10 bullet points on the subject is “diving deep” and making huge time investment. True, but you're using so many abstractions that the rule can't feasibly be "read a short summary of every abstraction you're using." There are just too many. At some point you have to choose a threshold where the likelihood of an abstraction leakage is sufficiently low. When you're debugging a CSS selector you will almost certainly never need to know about even the existence of, say, Fermi–Dirac statistics.
          • dotopotoro 4y ago
            > True, but you're using so many abstractions that the rule can't feasibly be "read a short summary of every abstraction you're using." Rule - no. Goal - yes. Some topics are more stable and valuable then others, so prioritisation helps. “How utf8 generally works” vs “implementation details of js-node-utf-related-library-X.”