i'm not doing databases for living but the idea of stringifying a perfectly cromulent unique number in order to store it in the database comes as slightly weird to me.

If you’re using a new-to-you ORM, and you don’t ever check the docs to see the basic primary key syntax… it’s SQLAchemy, it’s well documented and there’s tons of prior art.

Also I don’t understand their business case but if a user has a primary key, a unique user ID, and a unique customer ID, then all three of those uniquely identify the customer. (Weird, but there are some plausible explanations.) But then why would you need both the user ID and the customer ID in the subscription table is this some stripe thing I don’t understand or are they just bad at this?

the upside: we can now watch "disruptive startups" go through the aquire funding -> slapdash development -> catastrophic failure -> postmortem cycle at breakneck speeds

roided autocomplete

My autocomplete:

• written in an hour on a whiteboard for a job interview
• uses only the finest words, hand-selected by unix
• speed and size efficient

Roided autocomplete:

• years of development, billions of dollars of investment
• hallucinates constantly
• projected to use all computing capacity at current rates

I actually tried letting ChatGPT-4o write some tests the other day.

Easily 50% of the tests were wrong. They ignored DB uniqueness constrains or even datatypes. In a few cases, they just hallucinated field names that didn't exist.

I ended up spending just as much time cleaning up the cruft as writing them. I could easily see someone just starting out letting the code go through.

Commit messages are overrated.

Now that's the kind of bad hot take I read awful.systems for! Let's all call ourselves "engineers" but write no documents but emoji laden jokes, and produce no work except for the copy-pasted excreta from a chatbot!

It’s okay to copy/paste your basic model structure for SQLAlchemy classes, but copy and paste from the SQLAlchemy docs. Sweet suffering stack overflow, did nobody even look at the docs ever, or did they only trust ChatGPT? SQLAlchemy‘s simple for basic use cases.

Also here is such a nutshell of everything wrong with YC: jackhole prompt fondlers with no tests, no paying customers, who turn on the most important new feature in prod at the end of the day (jesus wept), and yet with all that clown show,

We had eight ECS tasks on AWS, all running five instances of our backend (overkill, yes we know, but to be fair we had AWS credits).

What the actual fuck.

bayfucker advice

perfect

Even with inadequate tests, inadequate monitoring, and an inadequate integration testing environment; how did it not go like this:

"Hmm the web server appears to be working, but maybe the database is making an oopsie we did just do that whole stupid db migration without a gradual ramp up"

"Oh hey here's an idea, why don't we make sure error messages from the database are logged maybe it's silently crying out in pain right now :D"