My point here is that it is important to match the tech stack to the challenge you're facing. When I started thinking about how to solve this problem my first reaction was to design an overly complicated distributed message queue using PG Notify, Redis, Kafka or something along those lines. The key takeaway here is that I realized that I probably wouldn't end up with more than 1000 customers, so I just needed to design a system that could comfortably handle that level of traffic without much effort. If, by some miracle, my business goes crazy viral, I know that my cloud provider can probably handle up to 200,000 customers by just updating a slider in my dashboard, which is way more business than I want anyway.

Engineers love to fantasize about Google levels of scale, but that's just not realistic for a lot of services.

In the end, I decided to just go with the simplest solution possible. In my case it's just a barebones Go gRPC service that uses an in memory channel to send notifications between connected clients.

The reality is that this simple Go server will scale up to about 1000 simultaneously connected customers on about 2gb of RAM. I don't expect to have more than that many paying customers, and if I do I can always just throw a bigger VM at the problem.

Engineers love to over complicate things in the name of infinite scalability, when in reality you can save a lot of time and effort by just understanding the scope of the actual problem you're trying to solve. Fingers crossed that this will become an issue for me some day, but until then most of us just don't need to worry about it!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837409

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147195

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

I assume end to end encryption would help mitigate this. Breaking E2E encryption would require a client side update that could be hard to implement if the company has already gone belly up.

For context I am the developer of an app called Digital Carrot[1] that lets users create goals for themselves that are verified by data from connected services. For example someone might create a goal to go to the gym, which the app verifies by reading GPS data from your phone. Needless to say my app handles a lot of very sensitive data and the app's privacy policy prohibits me from accessing any of this data for any reason. I've been curious if there is a way to put some kind of legally binding clause in my privacy policy that would prevent a future owner of the app from just forcing all the users to agree to a new policy that lets them harvest all of this data for nefarious purposes. Does anyone know:

1. Is this possible? 2. Has anyone done something like this? 3. What kind of mechanism would you employ to enforce this?

[1] https://www.digitalcarrot.app/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026654

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785038

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

One problem I personally have here is that I write code as a way to reason through and think about a problem. It's hard for me to grasp the best solution in a space until I try some things out first.

My first experience with it was a year ago and the tests it produced were so horrendously hard to maintain that I kinda gave up, but I imagine that things have gotten a lot better in the last year.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420767

Points: 39

# Comments: 79

It's a cross platform productivity app that lets you block apps, websites and games until you reach a set of verifiable goals such as walking 10,000 steps, physically going to the gym or finishing all your tasks on your to-do list.

I just finished the Android version a few weeks ago!