[nischalshetty]

I've been developing on appengine for over 2 years now. Thanks to the platform, I've never been worried about traffic spikes. Whether you get profiled on TC or a celebrity tweets about your app, you know it will run. Given, you would not learn admin skills, but you'll learn a lot of other things.

I learnt how denormalized data in the datastore can help speed things up for your app. I learnt sharding thanks to app engine. The pricing has made me make use of memcache more often and trying to avoid hitting the datastore. When I look at it, I feel I've brought in more discipline in my code because of app engine. I am now in the habit of building APIs that would run instantly. If a http call takes too long, my instinct is to make it run as a background task and then return the result.

I've learnt all of these because I've been on App Engine. I can see a significant improvement in what I'm building now. The apps we build now, all our users say it's "fast and responsive". A lot of that credit goes to App Engine and the things it has taught me.

Nothing you learn in life is really a waste of time.

[mgkimsal]

Great that you've learned things, but nothing you've mentioned there is specific to GAE. Many people learned abour sharding and such well before GAE even existed (indeed, perhaps even before Google existed).

This is akin to saying "Rails made me a better developer", which in and of itself is not bad or wrong, but isn't really terribly useful as a datapoint when deciding which framework to choose. Frameworks by their very nature (almost always) force concepts on you that improve your code. So too with GAE - by limiting some of what you can do, they can provide a more focused service.

[sam2themax]

That's because he/she was replying to the post above that said you can't learn any transferable skills from GAE. They were just mentioning some more abstract/general things they learned from GAE.