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I've seen most of the architectural problems in consulting - it's amazing how a team of clever engineers can take a simple thing and make it sooo convoluted. M

I've seen most of the architectural problems in consulting - it's amazing how a team of clever engineers can take a simple thing and make it sooo convoluted. Microservices, craptons of cloud-only dependencies, no way to easily create environments, ORMs and tooling that wraps databases creating crazy schemas... The list goes on and on; if you're early, you could do a lot worse than create a sensible monolith in a monorepo that uses just postgres, redis, and nginx and deploys using 'git pull' ...

claytonjy 4y ago
The worst architecture I ever saw came from consultants, who built the initial bits of a startup I was hired into. It was nice to have a no-longer-present scapegoat to shake fists at when frustrated, but over time I came to realize their most maddening choices were at the behest of one of our founders, who had no software experience.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  I saw the same thing. Founders asking the world of consultants who would try to deliver and then fail to be a responsible engineer. I started my previous job by telling the founders they were asking for the wrong things and the consultants work needed to be thrown out. Thankfully they listened and we ended up with a TypeScript monorepo monolith deployed to Heroku.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> Microservices, craptons of cloud-only dependencies, no way to easily create environments, ORMs and tooling that wraps databases So, Spring Boot you mean?
- noisy_boy 4y ago
  A Spring Boot service doesn't have to Microservice - you can happily fatten it up into a monolith. Cloud-only dependencies would come into play for Spring cloud (or something that is using cloud specific features) - for a "vanilla" CRUD app, they are not needed. Creating virtual/physical environments is out of Spring Boot's scope and better left to external tools though it has support for separate environments via profiles. ORMs/tooling that wraps database doesn't have to be part of Spring Boot - using Hibernate/JPA isn't mandatory; plain JDBC Template with hand-written SQLs would work fine.
bornfreddy 4y ago
Nitpick: no need for Redis if you have Postgres. It can have comparable performance when similar tradeoffs are used.
- dalyons 4y ago
  That’s just not true as a categorical statement. Performance aside redis has all sorts of interesting data types, operations and primitives that pg doesn’t that you might want to leverage. It fulfills a different role
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Can you elaborate? Is postgres viable for caching?

claytonjy 4y ago

The worst architecture I ever saw came from consultants, who built the initial bits of a startup I was hired into. It was nice to have a no-longer-present scapegoat to shake fists at when frustrated, but over time I came to realize their most maddening choices were at the behest of one of our founders, who had no software experience.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago
I saw the same thing. Founders asking the world of consultants who would try to deliver and then fail to be a responsible engineer. I started my previous job by telling the founders they were asking for the wrong things and the consultants work needed to be thrown out. Thankfully they listened and we ended up with a TypeScript monorepo monolith deployed to Heroku.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> Microservices, craptons of cloud-only dependencies, no way to easily create environments, ORMs and tooling that wraps databases So, Spring Boot you mean?

noisy_boy 4y ago
A Spring Boot service doesn't have to Microservice - you can happily fatten it up into a monolith. Cloud-only dependencies would come into play for Spring cloud (or something that is using cloud specific features) - for a "vanilla" CRUD app, they are not needed. Creating virtual/physical environments is out of Spring Boot's scope and better left to external tools though it has support for separate environments via profiles. ORMs/tooling that wraps database doesn't have to be part of Spring Boot - using Hibernate/JPA isn't mandatory; plain JDBC Template with hand-written SQLs would work fine.

bornfreddy 4y ago

Nitpick: no need for Redis if you have Postgres. It can have comparable performance when similar tradeoffs are used.

dalyons 4y ago
That’s just not true as a categorical statement. Performance aside redis has all sorts of interesting data types, operations and primitives that pg doesn’t that you might want to leverage. It fulfills a different role
moneywoes 4y ago
Can you elaborate? Is postgres viable for caching?