In my usual twitter doom scrolling, I came across this post the other day
Now it’s pretty obvious to me that this is one of the standard “engagement bait” posts that are commonplace nowadays. It’s designed to polarize opinions and thus the resultant “discussion” becomes a lot more inflammatory and thus succeeds the goal of engagement.
But putting aside the obvious intent, when I was scrolling through the replies, one thing stands out – man oh man are our tech egos out of control.
No-one replies with “Whatever I choose, it probably won’t really matter to me, because I’m like 99% of other IT professionals – I’m building moderate scale systems for my company“. Because that doesn’t sound impressive does it? Everyone has to chip in with replies that sound as if they are building a distributed microservice, event-driven, multi-region failover, horizontal scaling service mesh with five different caching layers. Nobody wants to say “Yeah, we’ve got 20 or so concurrent users“, they want to say “We’re ready to support 400million customers“
Now I’ve got no problem with a little face-saving and truth-inflating when it comes to posting on social media 🙂 But the problem comes when our obsession with internals takes our focus away from things that ultimately will be of more values to our users:
- Does it crash when someone puts in an invalid date?
- Does it handle the situation when Karen in Sales clicks the “Process” button twice?
- Can it be viewed by people with accessibility challenges?
- Does it do the function that is actually requested by the customer?
Not every software project is one funding round away from becoming the next Netflix, Amazon or Uber. Most software projects have a much more mundane reality. They’re built for a few dozen employees, or a few hundred customers, and are not intended to appear in next months “What’s hot in tech” article in Time magazine.
Given that a modern budget laptop can do 1000s of database transactions per second, you obsessing about power of UUIDv7 over other alternatives is perhaps not the best use of your time. For many workloads, a couple of CPUs (either your own or on a cloud service) with a functional data-centric front end (eg Oracle APEX) is going to comfortably handle traffic levels that would have seemed impossible a decade ago, and hence let you focus on the stuff that really matters – the customer functionality and the customer experience..
Yes, there are applications that genuinely require massive scale, will need sophisticated architectures, and hence a robust discussion on the database design implementation specifics. But perhaps don’t start with that assumption – you probably are not building the next global platform.
(Puts marketing hat on briefly…) Don’t take my word for it. Give Oracle APEX a go for free and you’ll probably find that’s all you need to get great applications and happy customers.
Having an ever growing amount of tech knowledge is a great thing to aspire, just make sure you’re not really focusing on an ever growing amount of tech ego.
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