Get the latest tech news

Great software design looks underwhelming


--

It was a single Python file (maybe thirty lines of code in total), written in a very workmanlike style: the simplest, most straightforward way to meet the challenge requirements. This exposed us to a few nasty failure modes: resource starvation for the rest of the app, proxy timeouts on index requests, and users just giving up after waiting ten seconds for a response. We still had the nasty 200ms-per-record code, but it was now under our control: it couldn’t be triggered by user actions, and if it failed the worst-case scenario is we’d just serve a stale blob.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News