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There are great bits of discussion about SQLite being maintained and enhanced by a very small team - three people. While I very much appreciate the safety of b

There are great bits of discussion about SQLite being maintained and enhanced by a very small team - three people. While I very much appreciate the safety of being a very small cog in a larger machine, I also wonder how my career might be more enjoyable and satisfying if I had chosen to limit my options to small teams where every single person on the team had a critical impact on the success of a project.

richardlblair 4y ago
There are organizations, even large ones, that prefer to work this week. Trying to set the maximum number of team members to 6 people including a PM and a designer. As you move through your career I highly recommend adding a question during the interview process to address this. It really does make a big difference on your quality of life, and you'll make some great friends along the way.
ilyt 4y ago
That kinda entirely depends with what people you're stuck with. In 6-10 person team you can just avoid working with that one colleague you just can't gel with (even if they might be perfectly fine from competency standpoint). I think medium-sized projects (say a team of max 10, or maybe 2 smaller ones) seems to be the most fun ones. You have enough manpower to do some bigger reorganizing if required but it isn't as big that rewrite of any part is years-long saga.
jerrygenser 4y ago
Is there a succession plan in place given the bus factor [1] with such a small team? Is anyone else concerned about maintenance if either a normal everyday medical issue came up or in the worst case something unimaginable? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
- xiphias2 4y ago
  It’s not really a problem when it’s a 100% well tested software.
- bob1029 4y ago
  From my perspective, SQLite is stable enough to be considered "done". For our product, we could go back to builds from 2020 and none of our customers would be able to detect a difference. SQLite is not something we wire up and expose bare-ass to the public internet. We don't worry about 0-day security issues in this context. It's more like a wrapper our product uses for structured disk access. Anything that would warrant urgent patching is in .NET vendor or in-house software piles. If something horrible happened and the entire SQLite dev team was wiped off the face of the planet, I'd make a note to look at alternatives by ~2025.
- rwbt 4y ago
  Yes, Dr. Hipp mentioned it once that there is a foundation in place to take care of things and increase the bus factor. I think that was one of the conditions before Nokia signed their agreement to license SQLite for Symbian.

richardlblair 4y ago

There are organizations, even large ones, that prefer to work this week. Trying to set the maximum number of team members to 6 people including a PM and a designer. As you move through your career I highly recommend adding a question during the interview process to address this. It really does make a big difference on your quality of life, and you'll make some great friends along the way.

ilyt 4y ago

That kinda entirely depends with what people you're stuck with. In 6-10 person team you can just avoid working with that one colleague you just can't gel with (even if they might be perfectly fine from competency standpoint). I think medium-sized projects (say a team of max 10, or maybe 2 smaller ones) seems to be the most fun ones. You have enough manpower to do some bigger reorganizing if required but it isn't as big that rewrite of any part is years-long saga.

jerrygenser 4y ago

Is there a succession plan in place given the bus factor [1] with such a small team? Is anyone else concerned about maintenance if either a normal everyday medical issue came up or in the worst case something unimaginable? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

xiphias2 4y ago
It’s not really a problem when it’s a 100% well tested software.
bob1029 4y ago
From my perspective, SQLite is stable enough to be considered "done". For our product, we could go back to builds from 2020 and none of our customers would be able to detect a difference. SQLite is not something we wire up and expose bare-ass to the public internet. We don't worry about 0-day security issues in this context. It's more like a wrapper our product uses for structured disk access. Anything that would warrant urgent patching is in .NET vendor or in-house software piles. If something horrible happened and the entire SQLite dev team was wiped off the face of the planet, I'd make a note to look at alternatives by ~2025.
rwbt 4y ago
Yes, Dr. Hipp mentioned it once that there is a foundation in place to take care of things and increase the bus factor. I think that was one of the conditions before Nokia signed their agreement to license SQLite for Symbian.