HTAP is here! It seems like these hybrid databases are slowly gaining adoption which is really cool to see.
The most interesting part of this is the improvements to transaction handling that it seems they've made in https://github.com/alibaba/AliSQL/blob/master/wiki/duckdb/du... (its also a good high level breakdown of MySQL internals too). Ensuring that the sync between the primary tables and the analytical ones are fast and most importantly, transactional, is awesome to see.
It's very powerful to have ownership over a framework that many developers are familiar and like!
It might not be clear just yet what the path to monetization looks like but an easy example would be deeper integrations with the rest of the Cloudflare ecosystem (for example allowing R2 to be easily along with something like duckdb to live in a world of truly local analytics or something like that).
It seems like these great open source frameworks need to monetize by building a platform around the product but these days it's hyper competitive (ex. Vercel, Cloudflare) and it's hard to get started without an incredible differentiator. So, while monetizing independently as a company might be difficult, Astro can provide a lot of value to the rest of the Cloudflare ecosystem.
Astro is my favorite framework for static sites. It's hard to describe but it just "makes sense". You don't need complex build setups and you can get the best of all worlds with great SSG capabilities + can easily express things with React when needed for example.
I wish there was another path to monetization besides joining a larger company but I'm happy that the team will get to continue building out an amazing framework!
It seems like an expansion play from their team and their end vision as both a platform (clickhouse + postgres) and product (observability) seems to be pretty good combo that fits hand in hand.
Usually there are nuggets of wisdom in lists shared like this but I feel like every lesson shared here has immense value.
> "remain skeptical of your own certainty"
> "Model curiosity, and you get a team that actually learns."
These are two lessons that typically require battle scars to learn. For such big ideas to be summed into two sentences is pretty remarkable and puts to words lessons I wish I knew how to share. Amazing article, thanks for sharing!
It seems like this might be one of the biggest vulnerabilities in recent times...
The default react / nextjs configurations being vulnerable to RCE is pretty insane. I think platform level protections from Vercel / Cloudflare are very much showing their utility now!
if it increases topline metrics like watch time it's probably hard for them to justify removing it. a change this big seems like it was probably a/b tested and did move metrics significantly?
always wondered at what scale gossip / SWIM breaks down and you need a hierarchy / partitioning. fly's use of corrosion seems to imply it's good enough for a single region which is pretty surprising because iirc Uber's ringpop was said to face problems at around 3K nodes.
it would be super cool to learn more about how the world's largest gossip systems work :)
in the super public consumer space, search engines / answer engines (like chatgpt) are the big ones.
on the other hand it's also led to improvements in many places hidden behind the scenes. for example, vision transformers are much more powerful and scalable than many of the other computer vision models which has probably led to new capabilities.
in general, transformers aren't just "generate text" but it's a new foundational model architecture which enables a leap step in many things which require modeling!
I think the conclusion isn't as simple as "foundation model companies will just build the features of all downstream products" because focus and priorities play a big part.
If that were the case a simple example is much of software services we see today (and provide real tangible value) wouldn't exist as it's theoretically just updating data in a database.
Cannot +1 this enough! Joining a team you respect and seeing how they operate gives you a really good baseline to work off of and take what you like and modify what you disagreed with.
You'd be surprised how many times you can "iterate and fail quickly" only to end up at an established practice some other shop has been doing for years. It is important however to understand the why behind the decisions as otherwise you're no better than just figuring it out yourself
Honestly this is a super respectable culture. I would think many leaders want to build teams with this mindset but find it incredibly difficult for one reason or another
This seems like a similar and more feature complete / polished version of JSON RPC?
The part that's most exciting to me is actually the bidirectional calling. Having set this up before via JSON RPC / custom protocol the experience was super "messy" and I'm looking forward to a framework making it all better.
This metric is typically tracked internally and probably wouldn't be as public because it could indicate how "buggy" a product is. An easy way to measure this is time spent taking incidents from open -> mitigated -> resolved and treating that as time spent * engineers for amount of impact.
The tricky part would be measuring time spent on hardening and making the business decision on how to quantify product features vs reliability (which I know is a false tradeoff because of time spent fixing bugs but still applies at a hand wavy level)
cool initiative! building apps locally without the cloud services has definitely been quite challenging both to setup and maintain when I've done it before
The most interesting part of this is the improvements to transaction handling that it seems they've made in https://github.com/alibaba/AliSQL/blob/master/wiki/duckdb/du... (its also a good high level breakdown of MySQL internals too). Ensuring that the sync between the primary tables and the analytical ones are fast and most importantly, transactional, is awesome to see.