The one thing about that era that has always seemed unique is that for people who lived it, a few years was a very big deal. Even now that I'm much older, talking to people in my age range it still blows my mind how different people's life experiences were just due to be 2-3 years different in age.
Especially for anything tech oriented.
Talk to people who were computer science majors in the 90s, you'll find that their curriculum varied wildly depending on exactly what years they were there. a 2-3 year difference could be huge.
Same is true for how they experienced the internet, interacted with media, whether or not they were mobile native or landline native, and so much more.
Less tech oriented but the 90s had an enormous shift in terms of corporate culture. The people who were a few years older than me reported wearing suits to work. By the time I went off to be a corpo, it was usually casual wear, not even business casual. For the same types of roles & companies!
There were ones before that, my mom had one. Apple added polish and used a capacitive touchscreen instead of a resistive one, then amped up the hype in their commercials, so everyone forgot these existed.
Possibly a Palm Treo, introduced in 2002, or a Windows-based PocketPC, introduced in 2000.
I always felt that Apple basically reimplemented PalmOS with the benefit of ~10 years newer technology and a wildly efficient Chinese supply chain.
I definitely wouldn't say that these devices were mainstream. They were very much targeted toward business people and hardcore nerds. The iPhone definitely revolutionized the market, with its vastly more desirable aesthetic and approachable interface.
It may have been a 2005 phone or something. I think it was a Nokia, Motorola, or Samsung phone (our whole family was on those at the time), but whatever it was it had just about the complete form factor and an app store - mostly a screen with a grid of apps on home, with a couple of buttons at the bottom (more Android than iPhone). Maybe it had a slide-out keyboard? Can't remember that part for sure.
It's funny, being someone who was terminally online then and now, back then I had immediate access to orders of magnitude more information than I did a few years prior as well as a normal person. These days the amount of information I can pull at the drop of a hat is so much more than back then it is mind boggling. Also a normal person isn't that much different in capability vs a terminally online person such as myself.
Yes, and that imo kind of cheapens the whole effect of it. We're witnessing something similar now with genAI and slop people produce with it. First few moments it was wow, look at all of this and now it's noise.
There is no reasonable metric by which one can claim US software devs are hard up I think is the point being made.
Everyone would like to make more but I was interpreting this thread as suggesting a us dev whining that as a field they’re being mistreated comes off a bit gauche
Chan Zuckerberg Institute doesn't produce much actual research it's mostly fancy dinners, global travel for congresses and conferences and big opulent parties. They actually got in trouble in the building with the landlord for too many parties, there was a problem drunken individuals peeing in the hallways when they had Justin Bieber and other celebs on site (seriously).
It scales beyond the needs that most people have in most situations.
The constant problem is that "big scale" always means "larger than I've seen", so on any project larger than a person has encountered, they assume they need to pull out the big guns. Also, people worry about things like what happens if they really *do* scale 10 years from now.
Neither is a practical concern for nearly anyone who will ever face this decision.
And then yes, of course, some people have problems that actually can't be solved by Postgres. But verify this first, don't assume.
What gets me is that some people seem to ignore the very real cliff of complexity that ramps up the moment you move to eventual consistency. If you need it you need it, but you have to bake in those assumptions everywhere - and they commonly break the default assumptions of those who don't have a bunch of experience with it or haven't architected their approach to work around those.
And in many cases it's those architectures that force more complexity and make it appear like they have much bigger challenges then they do. Great for resume driven development, but often you can get away with far less.
When you scale horizontally from day one, it usually gives fault tolerance for online service, and this story is not very friendly in case of vertically scaled PG.
My point is that in PG, fault tolerance requires untrivial investments.
If you pick horizontally scalable DB (foundationdb, cocroachdb, scylladb, tidb, etc) they all give you fault tolerance for free without much involvement from your side, because it is part of the nature of those DBs.
Fellow Rancho Gordo bean clubber and I saw the same thing. If I really go hard, like eating them with every meal for most of a week I'll notice it building up but otherwise not really.
reply