digitxpc

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the anti-forking sentiment among the community and how tight the governance structure of the project is. Open source is hard, and people will always have unfair expectations of open source, but if I'm to take the article at face on the forking drama, what's so bad about letting people tinker with it and release their own forks of Elm? If you're burned out, what's the harm in letting others step in more?

I've written up an at-scale production backend in Node.js and can very much stand by the decision to use Node over Elixir or Go (which I was considering at the time). I think fundamentally, the power of a JS-based backend is its pragmatism--it's not the best at most things, but it comes very close to it in so many categories that it's a safe option for a lot of use cases.

> It seems like people jumped to node based on some performance promises that didn't really pay off (IMO). And since then, we have newer options like Rust, Go, and Elixir as performant back-end options, and even older choices like Ruby and Python have continued to improve.

I'd agree that Node.js performance is generally not the best reason to be writing a backend in it since a static language will often yield better performance, but for the amount of dynamic power you get, it's extremely performant by default[1]. The next most performant dynamic language for I/O is, like you said, probably Erlang/Elixir, but V8 is generally understood to have better CPU-bound performance than BEAM.

[1]: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

> Seems like the standard arguments would be that developers already know JS, and that you can share code with the browser. I don't find these highly compelling.

I've found that developers already knowing JS is a very practical reason, if not ideological. I'm in a team with a lot of generalists who like to work full-stack, and being able to use the same mental models and syntax is a lot of cognitive load lifted off our shoulders. It also doubles the hiring pool of people who can hit the ground running on the backend, because now anyone who has experience with JS on the frontend can jump over to the backend with relatively little training.

The other key reason for a backend in JS is that the community is extremely large, which means that a lot of the troubleshooting I'd have to do in languages with smaller communities is done for me by someone who was kind enough to post a workaround online. This saves me a lot of time and energy, as does the plethora of packages.

Designing a solid contract can be useful even when you’re one person, for the same reason that decoupling classes or concerns is useful. I don’t need to consult another person or read the code to understand what it’s expecting (especially true in contexts where documentation may not have been written yet).

The main use case I found was that my production database had a bunch of changes we did manually (early stage startup and all), so I used Migra to figure out what changes we needed to make to keep the migrations in sync with what was actually in production.

The more common use case is this idea in development—-experiment with different schemas manually and then use a tool like Migra to figure out what migration to write, without keeping in your head what changes you’ve made.

That would require the computer to be bootable, so it wouldn't allow you to get around a fried motherboard sadly.

Throw lots and lots of money funding at a bikeshare system so that the system doesn't need to care about profit. Hire competent, driven people for the system so they feel motivated to make the system better even without any financial incentives.

(Perhaps a little pixie dust would help as well.)

"A room with four feet of water was built to last for several years with the intention of being more generalizable to the general population; but with each new room under its original design the old room is no longer suitable for real life use. So why do we keep asking the older room owners to build a new room with four feet of water?

"It doesn't provide a room with many plots that have no walls in it? They aren't as useful."

Is it that hard to design a house with multiple plots over it?

The vulnerability that GrayKey exploits isn't known: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/03/05/apple...

I'm fairly sure you can just use uBlock Origin and just disable all the filters.

Sygic Travel worked great for me and my girlfriend this winter.

There's a service called Smartlook (https://www.smartlook.com/) that does exactly this, at scale, for user analytics.