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Around 8 years ago we chose Scala for some random microservice, because there was ONE guy in the team that loved Scala and wanted to do something with it. I sai
by xtracto 4y ago
Around 8 years ago we chose Scala for some random microservice, because there was ONE guy in the team that loved Scala and wanted to do something with it. I said, sure go for it, it will be interesting to test the technology. After he implemented the microservice, it was rock solid for like 5 years. Said dev left 3 years later after implementing the service. Two years after he left, we needed to do something to the microservice... but nobody knew Scala in the team, so we have one or two "brave" guys who struggled to modify the Scala code.
The same thing happened years later in another startup in Elixir. I arrived to this startup and there was some random microservice that someone had implemented in Elixir because it was "the new cool language that solved all scalability issues". Again, the person that implemented it had left years ago, so nobody knew anything about Elixir or the microservice. Because I've dabbed with Elixir for fun, I volunteered to work on it. In the end we decided to supersede it.
I've learned to stay with boring technology. For me the sweet spot of productivity and team versatility is TypeScript and Javascript. Using these two technologies devs can do backend, frontend and mobile. The only thing missing is good bindings for Machine Learning.
- b3morales 4y agoTwo services each implemented by a single developer operated without problems for multiple business cycles and this is something to avoid? How does the effort of tweaking them in an unfamiliar language years later stack up against the effort they would have required otherwise?
- dustingetz 4y agoit moves money to the wrong people
- dkarl 4y agoSorry, but those two stories sound like dream outcomes. A more typical outcome is a service that is never quite right, needs bug fixes every release, requires a code change for every minor change in the system around it, and basically serves as a jobs program for engineers. Somebody nails a service so well that it does its job quietly for years with no further work? I don't care your code is written in Aramaic and causes other programmers' heads to bubble and explode, please stay on my team and give me another service just like it.