Comment by bitcrusher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitcrusher | Hacker News Reader

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I don't mean to belittle you either, but this is hogwash. Of course a Rails or Node developer wouldn't be able to write Postgres without ramp-up time...

Maybe what you're saying is that the ramp-up time would be LONGER for someone starting from Rails or Node only knowledge to being an infrastructure developer?

Any highly sophisticated application ( Postgres, LLVM, etc ) requires some advanced levels of domain knowledge but they aren't impenetrable fortresses of skill that no mere mortals can access.

I think, somewhere along the way, a lot of developers started believing this fantasy that they were the keepers of secret knowledge that only a few select individuals knew... GOOG and MSFT perpetuated that with esoteric interviewing processes and cult-of-personality style branding. The truth is... the fundamentals of CS aren't terribly difficult nor are they even terribly exciting. You can absolutely learn them on your own or even as you go.

> Any highly sophisticated application ( Postgres, LLVM, etc ) requires some advanced levels of domain knowledge but they aren't impenetrable fortresses of skill that no mere mortals can access.

Indeed. I think too many problems in our industry are seen as unapproachable. There's a lot of people working on postgres, me included, who did not have any sort of deep background in databases before. You start working on smaller things (I started making int -> text conversion faster), review other people's patches, start to develop new features, ... Gradually that gives you a more and more knowledge in database architecture. And you read a few good papers here and there.

Obviously that approach doesn't really lend itself to writing something like postgres from scratch - but realistically that's not something you're going to do on your own anyway. And if you do start a new project you don't set out to do something absolutely complete, but build it iteratively. With more domain knowledge, you're more likely to get the architecture halfway right initially, but in either case you're going to have to redesign and redesign and redesign.

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