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Twitter is a simple product that only has value because of the eyeballs that look at it, not the depth of the product. I fundamentally disagree with the premis

Twitter is a simple product that only has value because of the eyeballs that look at it, not the depth of the product. I fundamentally disagree with the premise of your blog post but not the premise of your company, so why don't I make an ask for you to write a much more practically useful application. Design a basic shopping cart using your system and compare and contrast it with a well designed relational equivalent. A system that allows products to be purchased and fulfilled is a far closer match to what the majority of companies are using software for compared to writing a Twitter clone. Here's my take -- at a certain point in scale and volume using a database, it actually does make sense to rewrite all of the following from scratch: - query planning - indexing (btree vs GIN, etc) and primary/foreign/unique key structure - persistence layer - locking - enforcing ACID constraints - schema migrations/DDL - security, accounts and permissioning - encryption primitives But more crucially, my belief and experience is that most companies making lots of money from software products will NEVER remotely reach that scale -- and prematurely optimizing for that is not just the wrong decision but borderline professional malpractice. You can get very far with Postgres and JSONB if you really need it, and you'll spend more time focusing on your business logic than reinventing the wheel. I'd like to be proven wrong. But I get sinking feeling that I'm not wrong, and while your product is potentially valuable for a very specific use case, you're doing your own company a disservice by distorting reality so strongly to both yourselves and your prospective customers. I'll round out this comment by linking another comment in this thread that goes very well into the perils of event sourcing when the juice isn't worth the squeeze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930591

nathanmarz 3y ago
Different applications will be more relatable to different developers. And that is the path we are going down, of steadily building up more and more examples of applying Rama towards different use cases. Some developers will get their light-bulb moment on a compare/contrast to a shopping cart, others vs. a time-series analytics app, etc. It's completely different for different developers, so building up that library of examples will take time. At the moment, we're focused on our private beta users who are technically savvy enough to be able to understand Rama through the first principles on which it's based. We started with a Twitter demonstration because: a) its implementation at scale is extremely difficult, b) I used to work there and am intimately familiar with what they went through on the technical end, and c) the product is composed of tons of use cases which work completely differently from each other – social graph, timelines, personalized follow suggestions, trends, search, etc. A single platform able to implement such diverse use cases with optimal performance, at scale, and in a comparatively tiny amount of code is simply unprecedented.
- SJMG 3y ago
  Most of the comments here bias negative, but you shouldn't take that to heart. Hackernews is, in general, conservative when it comes to attempts to displace entrenched, battle-tested solutions (especially when they come wrapped with unfortunate, hyperbolic rhetoric). It's a very impressive demo. You should be proud, keep your chin up, and keep us updated as Rama's value prop. continues to grow.
  - nathanmarz 3y ago
    Thanks
- yowlingcat 3y ago
  It's also a write-only workload that doesn't have to deal with updates intrinsic money movement, pricing, inventory, and other common workloads where atomicity is not a nice to have but a requirement. Twitter is trivial as a product compared to the most mundane shopping cart. You worked at Twitter? Okay great, I worked at AWS which runs the entire internet. And it doesn't really matter. Even if I am intimately familiar with where naive deployments of relational databases breakdown at scale, as well as mitigating approaches (cellular architecture) that make it possible to keep scaling them. You're not really addressing the substance of my comment so I am left to assume that your omission is because you cannot address it. Be that as it may, you'll hopefully at least take my final comment at its face value that you do your own product a disservice by overhyping what its use case is towards areas that it is objectively a poor fit. People have tried event sourcing many times and it's just not a good fit for many if not most workloads. You can't be everything to everyone. There's nothing wrong with that. My advice to you is this: call out the elephant in the room and admit that, and focus on workloads where it is a good fit. That extra honesty will go a long way in helping you build a business with sustainable differentiation and product market fit.
  - yayitswei 3y ago
    What was your role at AWS?

nathanmarz 3y ago

Different applications will be more relatable to different developers. And that is the path we are going down, of steadily building up more and more examples of applying Rama towards different use cases. Some developers will get their light-bulb moment on a compare/contrast to a shopping cart, others vs. a time-series analytics app, etc. It's completely different for different developers, so building up that library of examples will take time. At the moment, we're focused on our private beta users who are technically savvy enough to be able to understand Rama through the first principles on which it's based. We started with a Twitter demonstration because: a) its implementation at scale is extremely difficult, b) I used to work there and am intimately familiar with what they went through on the technical end, and c) the product is composed of tons of use cases which work completely differently from each other – social graph, timelines, personalized follow suggestions, trends, search, etc. A single platform able to implement such diverse use cases with optimal performance, at scale, and in a comparatively tiny amount of code is simply unprecedented.

SJMG 3y ago
Most of the comments here bias negative, but you shouldn't take that to heart. Hackernews is, in general, conservative when it comes to attempts to displace entrenched, battle-tested solutions (especially when they come wrapped with unfortunate, hyperbolic rhetoric). It's a very impressive demo. You should be proud, keep your chin up, and keep us updated as Rama's value prop. continues to grow.
- nathanmarz 3y ago
  Thanks
yowlingcat 3y ago
It's also a write-only workload that doesn't have to deal with updates intrinsic money movement, pricing, inventory, and other common workloads where atomicity is not a nice to have but a requirement. Twitter is trivial as a product compared to the most mundane shopping cart. You worked at Twitter? Okay great, I worked at AWS which runs the entire internet. And it doesn't really matter. Even if I am intimately familiar with where naive deployments of relational databases breakdown at scale, as well as mitigating approaches (cellular architecture) that make it possible to keep scaling them. You're not really addressing the substance of my comment so I am left to assume that your omission is because you cannot address it. Be that as it may, you'll hopefully at least take my final comment at its face value that you do your own product a disservice by overhyping what its use case is towards areas that it is objectively a poor fit. People have tried event sourcing many times and it's just not a good fit for many if not most workloads. You can't be everything to everyone. There's nothing wrong with that. My advice to you is this: call out the elephant in the room and admit that, and focus on workloads where it is a good fit. That extra honesty will go a long way in helping you build a business with sustainable differentiation and product market fit.
- yayitswei 3y ago
  What was your role at AWS?