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At a billion-dollar fintech, some engineer thought gRPC is too complicated. So, he built someything from scratch. A year later, there was a team of 5 engineers

At a billion-dollar fintech, some engineer thought gRPC is too complicated. So, he built someything from scratch. A year later, there was a team of 5 engineers maintaining a half-baked implementation of gRPC. Good for him. Bad for the company.

amoss 3y ago
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Who makes the game?
hsaliak 3y ago
Did that "some engineer" get promoted though? That's the real question.
chubot 3y ago
Haha ... honestly it is surprising how much work an RPC system is. Seems like it should't be -- you're marshaling arguments and return values But multiply that by a few languages, and now you have to paper over error code and exceptions, signed and unsigned ints, unicode and bytes Not to mention network errors, retries, throttling, etc. It tends to grow without bound, mostly because the RPC system tries to do too much. You can't really abstract the network -- that's the #1 lesson When you try to abstract the network, now you OWN a bunch of problems that you can't solve
erulabs 3y ago
To some extent my entire career has been searching for and destroying said half baked implementations. This saying can be adapted to infra: “half baked, bug ridden kubernetes”, “half baked, bug ridden proxySQL”, “half baked, bug ridden redis”, the list goes on and on. In some ways I feel like my impact has been quite boring, in other ways quite vital. But it’s never made me friends with the kind of developers who look sideways at the idea that other peoples life’s work might be better than their 5 year old weekend project.
- sgarland 3y ago
  ProxySQL is both mind-blowingly good and horrible. The documentation is awful, conflicts with itself, and has outdated information in some parts (looking at you, multiplexing information in extended_info). I still dearly love it. It makes operating a massive MySQL DB that has to deal with terrible queries from an ORM palatable.
  - erulabs 3y ago
    Haha the same can be said about kubernetes and my other examples! I totally agree. Still - some documentation is better than none!
    - sgarland 3y ago
      True, yes - I just rarely see ProxySQL mentioned in the wild, and I deeply feel that pain so I wanted to join in solidarity :D
intelVISA 3y ago
gRPC is too complicated to be honest (it obfuscates a simple underlying concept into mythos for $)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

amoss 3y ago

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paulddraper 3y ago
Who makes the game?

hsaliak 3y ago

Did that "some engineer" get promoted though? That's the real question.

chubot 3y ago

Haha ... honestly it is surprising how much work an RPC system is. Seems like it should't be -- you're marshaling arguments and return values But multiply that by a few languages, and now you have to paper over error code and exceptions, signed and unsigned ints, unicode and bytes Not to mention network errors, retries, throttling, etc. It tends to grow without bound, mostly because the RPC system tries to do too much. You can't really abstract the network -- that's the #1 lesson When you try to abstract the network, now you OWN a bunch of problems that you can't solve

erulabs 3y ago

To some extent my entire career has been searching for and destroying said half baked implementations. This saying can be adapted to infra: “half baked, bug ridden kubernetes”, “half baked, bug ridden proxySQL”, “half baked, bug ridden redis”, the list goes on and on. In some ways I feel like my impact has been quite boring, in other ways quite vital. But it’s never made me friends with the kind of developers who look sideways at the idea that other peoples life’s work might be better than their 5 year old weekend project.

sgarland 3y ago
ProxySQL is both mind-blowingly good and horrible. The documentation is awful, conflicts with itself, and has outdated information in some parts (looking at you, multiplexing information in extended_info). I still dearly love it. It makes operating a massive MySQL DB that has to deal with terrible queries from an ORM palatable.
- erulabs 3y ago
  Haha the same can be said about kubernetes and my other examples! I totally agree. Still - some documentation is better than none!
  - sgarland 3y ago
    True, yes - I just rarely see ProxySQL mentioned in the wild, and I deeply feel that pain so I wanted to join in solidarity :D

intelVISA 3y ago

gRPC is too complicated to be honest (it obfuscates a simple underlying concept into mythos for $)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]