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by eliribble
583 days ago
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Oh, hey, holy shit! You're one of my heroes. I've read through your internal discussions on protobuf within Google, you did amazing work there, and held your own against a difficult political environment. It sounds like you have no criticism of the technical approach, then, but rather just the business mechanics? That's eye-opening, given how much has changed in self-hosted deployment since Sandstorm started. If you started something similar today, ignoring business needs, would you build something technically similar? |
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You should probably take me with a grain of salt: of course, I, the technical architect of Sandstorm, still think the technical architecture is great. ;) Whereas I never claimed to be good at business so I'm not adverse to reporting I am bad at business.
But yeah I still think it's the right architecture. Still believe in what's written here: https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works
But I do think there is a lot of work needed to get to a baseline of functionality that people will use. Bootstrapping a new platform is hard and needs a long runway. Could you find investors willing to back it? I don't know. I hated fundraising, though.
Of course, there are many lower-level details I would change, like:
* Consider using V8 isolates instead of containers. Sandstorm had a big problem with slow cold starts and high resource usage which V8 isolates could do much better with. It would, of course, make porting existing apps much harder, but ports to Sandstorm were always pretty janky... maybe would have been better to focus on building new apps that target Sandstorm from the start.
* Should never have used Mongo to store platform metadata... should have been SQLite!
* The shell UI should have been an app itself.
* We should never have built Blackrock (the "scalable" version of Sandstorm that was the basis for the Oasis hosting service). Or at least, it should have come much later. Should have focused instead on making it really easy to deploy to many different VPSes and federate per-user instances.