I hope there'll come a time where the idea that these events that distribute ultimate power might not be flawlessly executed and maybe even partially fraudulent is seen with merit. It's certainly not the time yet, as always seen when this comes around.
I mean it's an incredibly over-saturated market. There are so many of these apps, they're all the same. There's little room for such errors IMO. But I'm willing to accept that it might have been an overreaction
Germany. Lots of privacy-focused minds. It became a bit of a topic during that crucial time when Whatsapp had some kind of scandal going on. I don't even remember the details. It was a chance of a lifetime for them. Well, in the end these apps are really all the same. I don't mind any of them really
Signal is such a tragic story. They had it all during the great uprising against Whatsapp. Even my non-technical friends started switching to Signal. They were exploding, more than Telegram ever was. And then they added some crypto bs right at the height of their hype. Bummer, no second chances from me, and removed from all those friends phones as a direct effect. They blew it
It also makes you look less like a genius haha. Yeah maybe you're right. It wasn't the best choice in hindsight. But switching jobs is a relatively rare thing in Europe. You only can do that ever so often, so I'll have a bit of waiting to do
I don't plan on staying long enough so that a deep investment is useful. I'd rather continue my efforts into getting rid of some database stuff. I certainly won't work with databases ever again after this, so every hour I spend with it is wasted. I'll pass on this technology. But I appreciate the effort.
It's pretty opaque to me. If something in my cpp code is dodgy or runs slow, I can use a number of debugging and profiling tools. While I don't really even know how databases work on the insides, let alone profile or diagnose them. To this day my colleagues rewrite equivalent SQL statements because some run better than others. And we regularly run into unexpected latency spikes where most of the time a statement runs fine, but even nth time it's several magnitudes of times slower - and no one knows why. So we cobble code and caches around things. It all seems pretty mind boggling to me.
I think my wtf moment was that you can't have real variable length strings. And I'm pretty pampered by c++ highly nuanced numeric types with varying sizes and signed/unsigned.
But that's the thing: All that is nice on paper. Of course the relational nature is nice. Of course the disk representation is nice. But I never feel like that's worth the trouble day in day out. The costs, the mystery box of performance, the insane statements, the extra hardware, the updates, the strange data types, the box of tricks everyone needs to make them behave. But I've been made aware that our usecases suck, so I'll attribute most to that.
The first thing I did was ask why we don't use sqlite or at least postgres. The answer was that they are free and therefore we don't trust them. So Oracle it is. Which is bananas because our customers have to buy an oracle license, which is money that we don't get. Pretty wild
All these comments seem to fuel my suspicion that we in fact shouldn't use databases, because we don't use any of these features. We just use them as external data storage for a single application. And not even that much data, like <10 gigs.
But the updating I would have expected to go more smoothly. If you make a point of using a software dedicated to managing data, I sure as hell would expect an update to go so smooth that I don't have to worry about or even notice it. In reality updates more often than not seem to come with undocumented errors. That is a constant source of frustration for me.
ok I get that, but at least our applications usually only have one thing (one thread of one process on one machine) operating on the database. So maybe it's just our silly usecase
As a hardcore c++ guy, I recently switched to a company heavily into databases. I never had contact to databases before. And I'd like to go one step further: Why databases?
I come from an industry that heavily uses custom binary file formats. And I'm still bewildered by the world of databases. They seem to solve many issues on the surface, but not really in pratice. The heavy limitations on data types, the update disasters, the incompatibility between different SQL engines etc all make it seem like an awful idea. I get the interop benefits, and maybe with extreme data volumes. But for anything else, what's the point? Genuinely asking