Hacker News Reader

Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a startup where the core backend was 1 giant serverless Function. For error handling and recovery, the Function ran in a while loop.

For all its faults, it worked and it was generating revenue. Enough that the startup got to a sizable Series A. That experience completely changed how I think about writing code at startups.

View on HN

"on error resume next" never died, it just became serverless!

A customer of mine wraps their Python code into try except pass so it never stops because of errors, it just skips what would have run in the code after the exception. I added some logging so we're slowly understanding what fails and why.

Of course, there’s a package for that https://github.com/ajalt/fuckitpy/blob/master/README.md

this is great. if you look at older game source code you find things like this. things that we view as horrible hacks which are both extremely stable and perform well.

i see no reason to stop using these types of solutions, when appropriate.

Suppressing errors and continuing to run in a corrupt state is good for games (crashing is definitely not fun, continuing to run might be fun, unless it's the kind of game where you can get yourself locked out of winning long ahead of time) but not good for most other kinds of code - it's better for your accounting code to crash than to save the wrong numbers!

Old games also didn't use a database, they saved everything in a giant text file.

I'm not sure if they were "extremely stable" though. Like Myspace, it might only work up until a certain point. What kills stuff is usually going viral.

I think you maybe underestimate the utility and reliability of flat text files on a filesystem.

If you don’t trust a filesystem, you can’t trust anything that uses one.

Flat files don’t scale past a certain point, but that point is way higher than most believe it is.

Specifically, flat files scale very far if there are no concurrent partial updates.

And "fork off a new process just to do the save" helps move that point farther away.

Microcontroller/embedded stuff also.

Are they hiring?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com