barryhennessy

Maybe they’re not selling this well. Maybe they’re so close to the AI research that this seems like an obviously good idea.

But there’s not one word of why this is good for LLMs, or how they tested/measured that.

My gut would tell me that a new solution put up against all the vega lite specs it’s already be trained on would be a hard thing to win.

It’s actually great to see a living example of how sensitive users* are to what to a lay person would look like a small amount of downtime.

The fact that we’re all talking about it, and not at all surprised, is a great example we can take when making the case for more 9’s of reliability.

* well, very technical power users.

SEEKING WORK | Berlin, CET | Remote: Yes | Full-time freelance or 20h+/week

Experienced Go architect (15 years; Zalando, StreamElements). I untangle fragile microservice architectures and make them boring again.

I’ve modernized fragmented microservices for hyper-growth companies, migrated Riak → Postgres under hard deadlines, and turned chaotic legacy systems into stable, scalable platforms.

Recent impact

Overhauled business-critical messaging systems for high-volume, low-latency workloads. Simplified/retired 11+ microservices, reduced latency, and improved observability — enabling a hyper-growth partner launch ahead of competitors.

Led discovery, design, and delivery of an auditable, multi-source, high-throughput inventory tracker — giving an e-commerce client immediate stability and a scalable foundation for years of growth.

Migrated an auth database from Riak → Postgres under a hard deadline (World Cup traffic). Zero downtime and smooth scaling through peak load.

Ideal clients

Berlin/EU scale-ups with distributed systems complexity — fragile microservices, data-intensive platforms, or legacy architecture that's become a liability.

€100+/hr retainer. Fixed-bid projects also considered. Available now for 3–6 months.

The usual stack

Go, Postgres, Kafka/NATS, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP

Get in touch

Email: [email protected]

Portfolio/CV: barryhennessy.com

As an industry we really need a better way to tell what’s going g where than:

- someone finally reading the T&Cs

- legal drafting the T&Cs as broadly as possible

- the actual systems running at the time matching what’s in the T&Cs when legal last checked in

Maybe this is a point to make to the Persona CEO. If he wants to avoid a public issue like this then maybe some engineering effort and investment in this direction would be in his best interest.

Ok, so far it sounds impressive.

But I’ve seen a lot of similar claims - just open LinkedIn for a second - and I always come back to the same questions:

- What value has been delivered?

- How much did you spend?*

- How long did it take _all told_?

I know you made a context management db. But if your argument is that AI is the future like this then that seems a somewhat self-referential proof.

What value has been delivered/products built outside of tooling to build products?

I’m aware you probably can’t be 100% open here - IP and all - but I feel it would go a long way to reinforcing your arguments the more concrete you can be.

* points for being up front about the 1000 per engineer minimum. But there’s still the human cost and actual token cost here

"My calendar is a true nightmare."

Check

"calendar systems suck. All of them."

Double check

"I’m trying to break off of big tech as much as I can"

I wish I could check this more ...

I've had similar needs/desires/gripes with my calendars and the terrible state of calendaring apps for a while. So thank you for scratching your own itch and sharing it with us.

I'm curious when you say that "[CalDAV] is an area begging for disruption". Can you enlighten us as to what your wishlist could be for (a) better protocol/systems/ecosystem might be? (a rant about your pain points might work too).

Thanks again!

I've seen polylith over the years and it's always piqued my interest.

I'm curious as to what has been built (by yourselves or others) in the 4 (?) years since its release. Have the experiences held up to the initial goals and designs?

Congrats on the launch and hitting HN's front page. Do you mind if I ask how your example site (multiplayer.dev) scaled?

I'm super curious about realtime multiplayer solutions (and I don't think I'm alone). But I find a great lack of info on what running this kind of app would cost. I come from the old-school hold-no-state, request->response->gtfo mentality, and I always have the _feeling_ that it'd be expensive to scale. Not just holding the websocket open, but how much effort do you expend parsing the WAL? How chatty is that kind of persistence mechanism? What other 'gotchas' are there etc.

I'd love nothing more than to dispel that vague feeling with data. I know it wouldn't come close to a full performance analysis, but throwing a few datapoints on a chart would help get a ballpark idea and tune my hype->action conversion.

I could nail down a pile of questions, but I'm sure you know better than I how to measure your own systems. But roughly I'm wondering: - how many users did you have? - how much traffic did you get? - how much would/did it cost to host on supabase? - how much resources did the database/realtime components consume?

Congrats again on the launch and have a nice weekend.

Interesting. Perhaps I misunderstood it. So is this roughly a kind of managed Keycloak/CAS setup? With it's own API/well managed client libraries?

I love the idea, and can definitely see the need.

But I always come to the same question with services that provide auth and user management: You pay a lot of money for someone _else_ to own critical information about your customers. What happens if you want to move away and use a different/your own/your customers own service?

Your customer data (at least login) lives in WorkOS' database. How do you get it out? How much does that cost? Are there contractual guarantees around that?

The same goes for your customers integration points. If the customer has to do any setup to integrate WorkOs for your app then moving away would involve them making changes. Not necessarily an easy thing to manage.

Not to be negative: I'd be happy to hear that WorkOS have great processes and guarantees around this.

Don't knock it - if it works and only costs 3MB that's a win.

The longer you can scale the product without having to scale the application, the better!

What kind of workflow and synchronization scripts?

These sound like the kind of hidden costs that could turn sqlite's simplicity quite complicated if you don't see them coming.

I'd be interested to know what kind of corruption you were facing.

I only very briefly looked into rqlite. It's very interesting, but if I understand it correctly it's also not geared toward a write heavy workflow. (all writes are routed to the same node)

I.e. it's leaning more toward the moderate, but reliable writes, and heavy read use cases?

Please let me know ~if I'm missing anything~ what use cases I'm missing.

That's a good counter-case to keep in mind, thank you.

I guess the take away here is that this underscores that sqlite isn't for the 'large number of writers' scenario.

p.s. > I didn't want to be the guy who comes in and says "you are doing it wrong" month 1 Very wise

Impressive numbers, thanks for sharing.

Out of interest, were you running on bare metal/cloud? And what kind of CPU was behind those 24M face compares per second?

Very interesting, what's your workflow? And how big is the DB?

I've never (deliberately) considered committing a DB to git. Although there was that one time when I was straight out of college...

Pro tip: surprising your colleagues in the morning with a 40 minute wait to pull master (because you committed a ???GB db) is a good way to feel like a right eegit.

Any chance I could convince you to share some of those 'rare exceptions'? I love a good exception ;)

Also they're where the real insights are.

Ouch, that sounds like a nasty bug. But if I understand correctly it's more the driver/ORM's problem than sqlite's?

One to look out/test for early if I go in this direction though. Thanks for the heads up!

I'm coming from a similar direction. Postgres is my go-to, and I love it's reliability when you get your schema right.

Glad to hear its type enforcement situation is improving.

> The irritant-free web

This is a very respectable goal. I wish you great success!

Good full text search without pulling in another dependency would be quite a win. I'll add fts5 to my reading list. :)

Out of interest, what kind of compute and storage resources do you have underneath that?