[tptacek]

You can curse us all you want. I curse things at random all the time. But then get back to work. The challenge you've briefly engaged with isn't a problem; it's a market opportunity. While the "it" crowd is repeatedly failing to achieve any lasting success with their completely pointless photo-sharing applications running on their 4th successive new storage backend (was mysql, then mongo, then homebrew, now postgres; really, was database-of-the-week really the social scene you wanted an entry pass into?), pick out offerings specifically based on what the "it" crowd would find unfashionable.

See if they're not begging you for jobs a few years from now.

The valley clique isn't a privilege for 20-something men; it's a trap for them. It eats their time, and, at least where it intersects with Hacker News, serves to out people you'll know never to work with professionally.

[Redoubtable]

Could not agree with you more. Part of the reason I wrote this was so I could mentally reset myself to get back to work. Frankly I'm embarrassed I got caught in the trap and spent valuable emotional energy on it caring about it in the first place. - Julie

[michaelwww]

It might help to think of the Hollywood model. The pretty young men they put out front are the actors and you are the writer. It's been noted before many times that writers don't get much respect, but they are the geniuses who come up with the narrative, the dialog, and the ideas that make up a successful production. Writers usually don't show off well to investors or at parties. That's where the pretty faces come in. I'm usually dismissive of the next young genius on the cover, because I'm more interested in the real brains behind the outfit, who may or may not be marginally social-able introvert living in an eco-bunker somewhere who definitely does not want the attention.

[smackay]

Michael Lewis' book, The New New Thing, probably offers a good insight to this. Jim Clark is probably the character that all the choreographers of pretty faces seek to emulate.

[marquis]

Try travelling and telling people what you do - you'll blow their minds. I take my laptop anywhere from New Zealand to Dubai to Argentina, and working On The Internet is still a novelty that you'll gain hearts and minds from the wonder of it all. Get some perpective on how awesome your life and work is!

[stcredzero]

People are downvoting you for advocacy of "big fish in small pond" psychology, but your comment does make me wonder: Why hasn't teleconferencing disrupted the economics of public speaking yet? Why, and is there an opportunity?

[doctorpangloss]

We make money. In the reality markets people pay us. And they pay us more for the product than it costs to create it.

I understand you were venting here, but in this paragraph it sounds like you still care deeply about how the It crowd perceives you.

[Redoubtable]

I'm sure I do or I wouldn't have felt the need to exorcise it in public. But I do definitely care that my business makes money and that what it costs us to make our product is less than what what we get paid for it. That is just running a business and answering to the market.

[thesagan]

Frankly, I needed to read your blog post for a "situation" I'm currently in, so your embarrassment is not in vain :)

[larrys]

"I got caught in the trap and spent valuable emotional energy"

Of course as a result of hitting that tipping point many more people know who you are now which isn't a bad thing and could have some future benefits.

[biscarch]

I seem to have fallen into a version of this trap.

MongoDB has made me a nice chunk of change as a consultant. These days when I mention MongoDB people don't even hide the crazy looks. The interview/meeting might as well be over then and there.

Since mentioning mongo sets the conversation back, I've instead choosing to focus my energies delving deeper into ecosystems like Riak-Core/Erlang which many developers still don't have a firm grasp on and are considered "serious" databases.

It seems to be working, but we'll see where I am a few years from now.

[mrchess]

Is MongoDB certainly declared "bad" now or something? I still thought Mongo is a viable option? Why would they give you crazy looks?

[biscarch]

danielweber is probably right. It's fashionable to hate on MongoDB now. There have been many, many articles detailing people having issues with it. Anything from losing data due to not keeping the set in RAM to "unsafe" defaults.

Typically the hate comes from people being unprepared and not researching their database options enough before making choices. IMO the fact that it's so easy to get up and running with Mongo actually works against it because it seems like the database "just works" until you start needing something from it.

Ex[1]: Foursquare took their Mongo instances to bare metal recently, keeping everything else on EC2. Most people starting with Mongo aren't thinking "at some point I'll migrate my database servers to our new datacenter to run on bare metal".

That said, the recent MongoSV didn't instill much confidence in the platform. You could overhear the frustration of 10Gen's event sponsors all day. Personally, I'm trying to move to distributed, masterless systems so Riak fits in very nicely. Yokozuna is also promising as a riak-solr type deal[2] and Riak Core can be used as a framework for creating distributed systems.

[1] http://www.10gen.com/presentations/mongodb-foursquare-cloud-...

[2] https://github.com/rzezeski/yokozuna

[gordaco]

That's news to me, I'm seeing exactly the opposite: NoSQL, and especially MongoDB, seems to be the rage in my environment. I'm not as up to date as the average inhabitant of Hacker News, so I guess I'm just out of touch.

[biscarch]

More likely than you being out of touch is that you're in a different environment than I am. Personally I don't believe people have to pick sides. It's not a war, more options are a good thing for people who have to pick databases.

[PommeDeTerre]

I think it's more just a matter of most people coming to the realization (after several years, for those who didn't realize it right away) that relational databases are what they want, and what they need.

There are very, very few situations where NoSQL databases are truly of any use. For practically all other cases, any time or effort savings promised when using a NoSQL database don't materialize in reality.

Take the claim that not having a schema is a benefit. This claim quickly falls apart when a huge amount of time and effort is needed to track data format/type/availability/constraints/etc. in an ad hoc fashion throughout all applications accessing the database. This is a huge amount of effort, and often duplicated code, in anything but the simplest scenarios. It's much more effective just to use a relational database and its support for defining a schema.

We see the same when it comes to querying using JavaScript. Maybe it works for simple queries, but those often aren't what we encounter in practice. SQL is by far the best we've got today when it comes to writing complex queries, and relational databases offer the best support for it.

Then there's ACIDity. "Eventual consistency" just doesn't cut it in the real world. Relational databases make it far easier, more practical and much safer to work with data in a transactional manner.

Many of the supposed strong points of NoSQL databases, like their sharding support, becomes irrelevant when using the replication support offered by so many relational databases.

It's not that NoSQL databases have been declared "bad", but instead it's just people realizing that the relational databases being used all along are really the best choice in all but a handful of cases.

[gordaco]

Sorry if this comes out as a little irrelevant, but I'm so glad there is someone else out there who thinks like you. I' ve already given up on proselitizing about the advantages of good ol' relational databases at my office. We DO have a schema (which has been consistent from the start, i.e., we haven't used our database in a flexible way), even if it's not explicit, and enforcing it actively in our code is just going to result in more errors than letting any mature relational database do it. And, yes, we've had a few of those errors (of varying severity) that wouldn't have happened with a relational database.

Non-relational databases are good when the data is really mutable enough that each row may have fields of its own, or lack them. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see it as that common, and it certainly isn't our case.

[onlyup]

Thanks for the post. I was about to start a project with CouchDB but was unsure why I was going to use it. I know relational databases/SQL better so I think I will stick with that.

Do you think there is benefit in using stuff like SQLAlchemy or should I write just SQL files/queries?

[pyre]

  | Do you think there is benefit in using stuff like
  | SQLAlchemy or should I write just SQL files/queries?

If you're just in it for the learning, then maybe drop SQLAlchemy to get your hands dirty and learn; otherwise just use SQLAlchemy. If you're getting into really complex queries and optimizations you're going to have to resort to SQL anyways, even with SQLAlchemy. An ORM just allows you to abstract away most of the mundane SQL tasks.

[onlyup]

Thanks. I know SQL and use it in work. I am starting a personal project that I plan on taking a long time so I don't want to have to go back to the start to change stuff. For what it's worth I am using Python with Flask.

[danielweber]

"There is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion." -- Paul Graham

[nswanberg]

Bringing up photo sharing apps was perhaps only a setup for bagging on over-excited storage technology enthusiasts, and I think I agree with your larger point of ignoring the somewhat arbitrary values of in groups, but with that said...

Only in the last five or so years have large groups of people been carrying around high-quality usable digital cameras with permanent internet connectivity, and even in those years the picture quality, usability, and connectivity have been getting better, and the number of devices out their keeps growing.

World wide web search has been thought to have been solved several times until Google came along, and even now, fortunately, folks have not given up on solving the problem of people searching for things.

So in five years how can a bunch of male 20-something storage fetishists in SV have solved all of the problems of photo sharing for everyone? Surely there are problems to solve remaining for them, or for anyone else who do not share their particular needs and want to take a crack.

And there are quite a few more problems to be solved in people sharing pictures of things.

[jakejake]

I think you are right, but it probably won't be a company that's essentially copying whatever every current "cool" startup is doing but putting an "r" on the end of their company name. It'll be people who truly innovate.

[javajosh]

>it's a market opportunity.

Yes, but not the one you describe, I think. The opportunity is for someone to present a coherent mental model for what's going on in tech that will fit so well that, even as it undresses VCs and startups in all their pointless glory, they will thank you for the insight. Someone who gets most of the large-scale points right is Carlota Perez. I think that her ideas can and should be applied to the "attention economy", ubiquitous computing, and human psychology, particularly with a certain moral bent that admits, for example, that moving someone's attention from what is more valuable to that person to what is less valuable for them (but more valuable to you), is wrong.

P.S. Homebrew is a package manager for osx, not a storage backend. </pedant>

[barrkel]

I believe by homebrew he meant roll-your-own.