

Pinboard.in blog - Technical Underpinnings - kylebragger
http://pinboard.in/blog/63/

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gr366
_"A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I'm excited to play
around with something, it probably doesn't belong in production."_

That has to be incredibly difficult to adhere to, but doing so probably saves
a ton of headaches.

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kareemm
Only difficult, I imagine, if spending time living life is preferable to
pulling hair out in heroic acts of troubleshooting / bug fixing.

Since maciej lives in places around the world, it seems like a good rule of
thumb.

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kneath
It must be a very boring life to purposefully work with uninteresting
technologies. It may sound selfish, but I'd never make that decision. When I'm
interested in what I'm working on, I build a better product. I'll sacrifice a
few 9's any day to enjoy my job and make something that's interesting.

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idlewords
You seem to be confusing the tools with the product. Nothing more boring than
a brick, but you can build some pretty neat things with them.

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kneath
My excitement for the tools I use is directly proportional to the excitement I
have for a product.

For example: over the past 4 years, I've all but abandoned all of my PHP
projects in favor of my Rails projects. Because Rails is far more interesting
to me than PHP. Just a small example, but it goes all the way down the chain.

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axod
What's even more exciting is making things people want, and use day in day
out.

Choosing the right tool for the job is better in the long run than choosing
the one you'd enjoy the most.

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jcapote
"favor boring and faded technologies where possible" == our site is held up by
tons of shell and perl scripts

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pvg
And runs on an operating system of ancient '70s design!

The overwhelming part of the codebase is really PHP. There's a small
smattering of perl to handle a couple of async tasks, as Maciej described.

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mootothemax
I'm currently looking for decent VPS hosting, and am shocked at how cheap
prgmr.com are; what have your experiences been like with them?

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idlewords
We just made the switch at the end of last month, so I can't say anything
useful. I do like their blog, which gives some insight into what it's like
running a service like this.

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icey
I like this: " _Our technical goals are to never lose data, be very fast, and
favor boring and faded technologies where possible._ "

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apgwoz
The quote: _"A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I'm
excited to play around with something, it probably doesn't belong in
production."_ was what hit me.

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kylebragger
I had a sense that this would end up being quoted quite a bit.

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vorador
Are you afraid by the fact that, later down the road, this architecture of
perl scripts may be a burden

I mean, everybody writes shell scripts, but usually the mindset when writing
them is "let's get something done" instead of "let's get it done right".

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idlewords
I don't think there's anything inherently hacky about Perl scripts (or any
other kind of scripts) if they're in the service of a coherent design.

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jrnkntl
OT: Is it just me or is that link unzoomable on an iphone?

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idlewords
That's a dumb error on my part, it should be fixed now.

