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by jasonshaev 1375 days ago
The tone of your post is unnecessary and not helpful to your point. I don't agree with the authors point but I can say that without being insulting or snarky.

In spite of that, when did "making a database product" count as not "hard?" Building a database isn't "real software engineering™?" Since when was building "authorization microservices" easy? In the simplest case, sure. But authorization in general is a huge problem space and I don't understand calling that "bs." Active Directory would like a word...
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sebastos 1375 days ago
On the contrary, I assume making decentralized database products is very hard. And I don't doubt that authorization is a whole can of worms. My point is not that they're easy, but that they're the type of problems you are most likely to care about if you're building a web service.

A web service. Not a moon rocket, or an MRI machine, or high frequency trading software, or computation fluid dynamics simulations, or a compiler, or a video processing pipeline, or a word processor, or a 3D game engine.

So, just saying: When bloggers consider the headline "Software component names should be whimsical", I wish they'd spend a second to ask themselves whether their advice actually applies to any of the niche domains I mentioned, or if it's just a best practice for their fellow web service developers. Presently, there's a cultural trend that you don't have to bother with that step, and you can just write as if your audience is always the other web service people in the valley. To me, that gets very grating, and that's where the snark comes from.

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jasonshaev 1375 days ago
Asking the author to provide more context on what domain(s) their blog post is meant to apply to is a reasonable critique.

However, consider whether your original post made that critique clear, or if it got lost amidst the other ... stuff. The first two lines, in particular, will immediately put some readers (myself included) on the defensive. Describing somebody's work as "some web service bs" is a bad start. And if your point had nothing to do with the "hardness" of the problems, only that those particular problems are most relevant to building web services, why not just say that? Instead of the "...somebody who works on some web service bs assumes that that's as hard as the world gets," bit.

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cjpearson 1375 days ago
When it comes to rockets, whimsical names seem to be much more popular. Most of them are named after mythical figures with SLS being a notable exception.
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