tysont

I led the engineering team at Fauna and this is false - we had a performance culture and performance managed/exited people when they did not meet expectations. I've managed some outstanding teams/organizations at Microsoft, Amazon, and Riot Games and the team behind Fauna was world-class; on par with the best teams that I have seen or been a part of. There are plenty of reasons that the company didn't succeed, some in our control and some out of our control, but the caliber of people at the company and the company culture are not on that list.

James Governor interviews Tyson Trautmann and Matt Freels from Fauna about the document-relational paradigm and the future of databases.

League sharded players to geographic regions and didn't allow matches between players in different regions. Geographic location wasn't a consideration in matchmaking otherwise AFAIK. I left Riot when Valorant was still under development and can't speak to how matchmaking works, unfortunately.

Nice catch! I investigated this today with the team and we realized that metrics from a dev environment (which isn't representative of our production topology) were being included in our status page internal latency graphs for the US/EU Region Groups. We addressed the issue - you can see the clean data on status.fauna.com.

To add a bit of color from the author, the content in the article was informed by my experience building distributed systems at Microsoft, Amazon, and Riot Games. At Riot we sharded our playerbase for a number of reasons (including complexity of matchmaking), but we may have chosen a different approach if we had a service like Fauna that could push data closer to players at the edge. With centralized relational databases, cross-region calls to load account info, entitlements, etc. would have been a very jarring experience in the client.

I've seen a number of database companies publish blog posts and put out tweets offering a competing point of view: that single-region is enough and multi-region doesn't matter. Would love to engage with that crowd here and get their perspective on the content in the blog post.

That's fair. I actually think that learning to gamify things is a valuable skill of it's own (and a very effective one if you're a gamer like you or I!).

Example: I bike to work down a very busy path that goes up and down Santa Monica/Venice beach. The path is supposed to be for bikes only, but on a sunny day it's totally packed with pedestrians being idiots, taking selfies, and nearly wrecking me at every turn. I used to get really annoyed with that until I decided to turn it into a game - see how many people doing dumb things you can spot on a commute in any given day. It didn't really fix the problem, but it at least made me grin instead of being cranky when I have to swerve to dodge a rogue selfie stick.

There's also the possibility that it's time for you to explore other job opportunities if you're not stoked about what you're doing. We're always hiring at Riot! :)