HACKER Q&A
📣 tonymet

Hard to Measure Design Decisions?


Some major design decisions like type safety , rdbms and monorepo have seen trends transition in favor , against and back again.

What are some good examples of “big” design decisions that are hard to measure conclusively?

- type-safety (eg perl/python/php were first made popular by lacking it, and now we are returning to it)

- rdbms vs nosql

- monorepo vs microservices

Others ?

This isn’t about advocating . Let’s think about what other concepts are hard to reach a conclusion about and why measuring success can be difficult .

  👤 obpe Accepted Answer ✓
If the goal of a project was to, "use a type safe language" then it can only be successful if you use a type safe language.

If the goal of a project is to, "create a crud app for your 5 coworkers" then it really doesn't matter whether you use SQL or not.

If the goal of a project is to, "server 100 billion requests per second" then maybe you should consider microservices in a monorepo (those things are not mutually exclusive).

Success, or not, only matters in the context in which you have defined success.