I get the desire to experiment with interesting things, but it seems like such a huge waste of time to avoid having to learn the most basic aspects of MySQL or postgres. You could "just" build on top of and be done with it, especially if you're running in a public cloud provider. I don't buy the increased RTT or troubles with concurrency issues, the latter having simple solutions by basic tuning, or breaking out your noisy customers. There's another post on their blog mentioning the possibility of adding 10 million rows per day and the challenges of indexing that. That's... literally nothing and I don't think even 10x that justifies having to engineer a custom solution.
Worse is better until you absolutely need to be less worse, then you'll know for sure. At that point you'll know your pain points and can address them more wisely than building more up front.
> I get the desire to experiment with interesting things, but it seems like such a huge waste of time to avoid having to learn the most basic aspects of MySQL or postgres.
For server-based database engines you can still make an argument on shedding network calls. It's dubious, but you can.
What's baffling is that the blogger tries to justify not picking up SQLite claiming it might have features that they don't need, which is absurd and does not justify anything.
The blog post reads like a desperate attempt to start with a poor solution to a fictitions problem and proceed to come up with far-fetched arguments hoping to reject the obvious solution.
If you want to shed network calls, the easiest solution would be to just run postgres or MySql on the same server and connecting to it via Unix domain socket. So even if SQLite wasn't an option network overhead isn't a good argument
Here’s the thing that I wonder about: would their business be successful if they didn’t spend all this time reinventing the wheel? Just by building it out in the open and blogging about it, they popularize their product and show their technical prowess. If they’d use the boring technologies that one sticks together and all works, they’d have less to talk about—and thus less publicity?
Wondering if my thinking is flawed, or if going this—arguably unnecessary—extra mile is part of the product and being successful in the space.
Worse is better until you absolutely need to be less worse, then you'll know for sure. At that point you'll know your pain points and can address them more wisely than building more up front.