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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else reading this and being quite happy that they're not working at this scale?

I don't mind scale. I mind the bureaucracy and promotion-driven-development that comes with working in a bloated engineering org.

+100

Many companies have products that operate at “scale”. They manage to do so with pretty boring techniques (sharding, autoscaling) and technologies (postgres, cloud storage).

Because of the insane blog driven tech culture, many of these teams get questioned by clueless leadership (who read these blogs) and ask why the company isn’t using cassandra / some other hot technology. And it always causes much consternation and wastage.

Anyone wanting to introduce $new/$other language, database, library, deployment system, build system into a large enough system that doesn't solve any actual problem is a nightmare for someone working at this scale.

I don't mind the scale, I like it. I don't like having to fend off questions and complaints why we aren't deploying the latest shiny new thing in our core this week.

Well we use Cassandra (actually ScyllaDB) because Redis no longer cut it.

But that's where the really fun and complicated problems are. The ones that really make you stop and think, and not just think, but be creative.

95% of the work is still the same "treading in well trod paths", same old same old tech work, but that 5% is really something.

I think I can understand the appeal, but it's just not there for me. I have enough complicated problems outside of work, some of which are even fun to solve.

This was a “double-pump” migration to a faster database and building a caching service. There’s nothing particularly fancy or creative about their solutions. The migration efforts and working out issues with the reverse table scan were probably way more creative, but they didn’t get into that unfortunately.

I'm happy I'm currently not working at this scale. I'm not happy when idiots (including one of our self-important ex-Google VP's) set this as a benchmark for backend interviews (for careers that 99% likely will never come close to such problems).

Any time I read anything about any web-adjacent technology I'm incredibly thankful that I don't work anywhere near that industry.

Embedded can be complex, but web stuff is just a Lovecraftian nightmare in comparison

I have stared into the abyss and seen the eyes of cthulu. I am much happier writing embedded drivers than I was trying to make sense of why previous devs thought it was a good idea to move bounded tunable server side api calls to the client, allowing it to effectively write arbitrary sql calls across multiple databases.

Iteration speed is significantly fast on the client. Perf is an afterthought — for better or worse

spoken like someone who doesnt deploy clients at discord scale?

the 200 backend nodes surely update significantly faster than the hundreds of millions of clients.

Sounds like a fun time lol

Fortunately the web is starting (very slowly) to return to sanity, pushing back towards the simpler server-rendered pattern with Javascript being relegated to specific use cases.

I really like the client rendered UI part. It’s a lot more efficient than sending the whole page again every time.

But you can cache the whole server side page and the cost is once. Whereas if you have the client side do the render then every client wears the cost.

You usually can't because of users who are signed in needing slightly different pages etc.

While not as fast as a purely client cached page, the server can selectively cache content, even when some bits of the page are dynamic.

We can also cache some of the dynamic JavaScript, depending on the scenario but your point stands.

Which becomes a far more important issue when dealing with bandwidth or CPU constrained devices, or artificially imposed constraints due to data usage costs.

That’s your generation that happens once. The browser still needs to render it. Sure, rendering it on the client may cost the client a bit more, but the client generally has the computational power to spare.

Which is precisely what is meant by specific use cases. We don't have to throw out the first 25 years of the web and reimplement all of our business logic in a minified JS blob. Even when client side code is necessary, the trend of pushing rendered HTML rather than JSON that must be parsed and rendered keeps us as close to browser primitives as possible.

Why would you implement the business logic there? You can still keep (most of) that in the backend.

The client just does orchestration.

Once you move beyond basic CRUD business requirements work their way into the UI. For instance, making fields read-only based on access level. Adding additional form fields, etc. Conditionally hiding and showing entire portions of the UI. All of which requires you to either pass around UI-directives in your data or implement business logic in your client code. Better to just ship HTML, and if we're worried about full page loads, just use one of the many over-the-wire options to only change small bits of a page.

This is before we get into having to implement application primitives like authentication on the client, and all of the state management that goes with. The absolute amount of scaffolding and plumbing we've built up just to save a few ms is always worth questioning. Doesn't mean the answer is no, just that we need to ask the question and not assume the default is carved in stone.

I am happy that I dont have to deal with this.

I am sad that my business aren't as big as this scale.

Honestly, 77 nodes doesn’t sound like a terrific scale? The more I scale things up, the more I realize that the tone of the problems doesn’t really change. You just get more layers to your data structures.

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