mcsoft (u/mcsoft) - Readit News

mcsoft commented on YC: Requests for Startups ycombinator.com/rfs... · Posted by u/sarimkx

brettv2 · 2 years ago

> NEW ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING SOFTWARE

Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through.

I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly.

I'm guessing an important feature would be an integration system that maps data from the current ERP seamlessly into the new ERP. And that assumes you can even get through the enterprise sales process to even get the company to migrate.

mcsoft · 2 years ago

It's the kind of software where early venture capital funding can be poisonous rather than helpful. Choosing the right abstractions to build a solid, flexible platform requires a lot of user feedback. You don't get the latter unless you have *paying* customers who have switched their critical processes to your product for a while. You need to build, sell, implement, and provide several upgrades. We bootstrapped a low-code BPM platform (pyrus.com) and were lucky to break even in several years. VCs push you to grow, while premature scaling could be harmful in the long term. It takes time before your platform is mature enough to serve inherently different use cases.

mcsoft commented on The pivot table, the spreadsheet's most powerful tool (2020) qz.com/1903322/why-pivot-... · Posted by u/airstrike

mcsoft · 2 years ago

I use pivot tables all the time. The concept is brilliant, but the Excel UI leaves a lot to be desired.

At first, you're amazed at the flexibility, but once you become comfortable, you suddenly hit the limitations. Can't sort by a calculated column, can't categorize without adding columns in the data, etc.

I looked at Quantrix for a while, and it was a bit too complex for practical purposes. I wonder if there are any decent PivotTable tools out there?

mcsoft commented on How FoundationDB works and why it works (2021) blog.the-pans.com/notes-o... · Posted by u/tim_sw

endisneigh · 2 years ago

Were you planning on using the Record or Document layer if you went with it? Or maybe making your own layer?

mcsoft · 2 years ago

We'd use the Record layer, but it was Java-only then. It would require us either to rewrite parts of our backend to Java or to implement some wrappers.

mcsoft commented on How FoundationDB works and why it works (2021) blog.the-pans.com/notes-o... · Posted by u/tim_sw

Jgrubb · 2 years ago

> transform continuous SRE/devops opex costs into developers capex investment

Would you mind expanding/educating me on this point? When I think of capex I think of “purchasing a thing that’s depreciated over a time window”. If you’d said “transform SRE/COGS costs into developer/R&D/opex costs” I would’ve understood, but eventually the thing leaves development and goes back into COGS.

mcsoft · 2 years ago

I assume a couple of things here: 1) that SRE costs would be lower with fdb at scale due to its handling outages, i.e. auto-resharding; and 2) that a migration project from *sql to fdb will be finite (hence an investment I hastily called capex).

Would love to hear from anyone with experience in fdb whether these assumptions hold.

mcsoft commented on How FoundationDB works and why it works (2021) blog.the-pans.com/notes-o... · Posted by u/tim_sw

mcsoft · 2 years ago

We have seriously looked at FoundationDB to replace our SQL-based storage for distributed writes. We decided not to proceed unless we are about to overgrow the existing deploy, a standard leader-follower setup on the off-the-shelf hardware. The limiting factor for the latter would be a number of NMVMe drives we could put into a single machine. It gives us couple dozen Tb of structured data (we don't store blobs in the database) before we have to worry.

fdb is best when your workload is pretty well-defined and will stay such for a decade or so. It is not usually the case for new products which evolve fast. Two most famous installations of fdb are iTunes and Snowflake metadata. When you rewrite petabyte-size database in fdb, you transform continuous SRE/devops opex costs into developers capex investment. It comes with reduced risks for occasional data loss. For me it's mostly a financial decision, not really a technical one.

mcsoft commented on How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers engineercodex.substack.co... · Posted by u/thunderbong

mcsoft · 2 years ago

The article says nothing about how they instantaneously updated millions of user feeds. It was the most challenging task, as it's way easier to scale reads than writes in distributed systems. Rumor has it early Twitter had a target of 5 sec to update everyone of 50M fan feeds when Justin Bieber touched a screen. I would love to hear some technical details on how they did it.

mcsoft commented on PRQL: Pipelined Relational Query Language github.com/PRQL/prql... · Posted by u/animal_spirits

mcsoft · 2 years ago

PRQL is a breath of fresh air. Reporting languages generally miss built-in visualization and drill-down capabilities. Ideal reporting query should define not only how to seek, join, and and aggregate data, but also how to visualize output and how to present details in reaction to user clicks. There are some limited efforts like in PowerBI and Splunk but we need a standard. I wonder if PRQL guys will address this need in the future.

mcsoft commented on FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank fdic.gov/news/press-relea... · Posted by u/khuey

Aeolun · 2 years ago

Conservation of money in that case. Money doesn’t just disappear. What goes away somewhere has to appear somewhere else.

mcsoft · 2 years ago

exactly

mcsoft commented on FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank fdic.gov/news/press-relea... · Posted by u/khuey

jfengel · 2 years ago

I think programmers find double-entry bookkeeping counterintuitive. It feels error-prone. In programming, you keep a single source of truth. Any time you copy the same data to two different places, one of them is always wrong.

Double-entry bookkeeping makes sense once you understand the the invariants you have to keep, and why you need to track 5 different types of books. Some of those accounts work in opposite ways, such that credit to one is a debit to another.

It all works out and is essential for "debugging" problems (when money appears to go missing -- or worse, materializes and you don't know why). But there's some counterintuitive language and it'll mess you up until you accept it.

mcsoft · 2 years ago

Double-entry bookkeeping is essentially the law of conservation of energy applied to balance sheets. It's much more deep as it was invented some 5 centuries earlier than programming.