DEV Community

Discussion on: What technology do you want to learn in 2019?

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

A few years ago when MongoDB was coming on the scene, I felt a lot of pressure to learn database technology so I could better understand the choices I was making.

I never really cracked the nut on developing a fundamental understanding of how the technology works, and I didn’t really need to. The basics often go pretty far in this space.

But in 2019 I think it is a good time in my career to put a lot of focus into the intricacies of database technology.

Collapse
 
rhymes profile image
rhymes

But in 2019 I think it is a good time in my career to put a lot of focus into the intricacies of database technology.

Great! The DB landscape has exploded :D I can't keep up!

By the way, The Guardian recently migrated from Mongo DB to Postgres, unfortunately they don't really talk about performance but the article is a nice read of their journey back to a boring technology ™. It's also filled with shade, like this picture titled "Postgres takes a bite out of mongo" 😂

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I think the DB layer is probably the least optimized area of dev.to right now. We’re smart enough to keep things simple, but we need to improve so we can hang our hat on this part of the work.

We overcome some naive queries with caching. But it’s not ideal. We may have some budget to hire more in this area, but I think it’s important to personally improve here as well.

My education is generally motivated by need. 😄

Thread Thread
 
rhymes profile image
rhymes

My education is generally motivated by need.

Same here :D

There are a few quick wins you can try on dev.to's DB, like checking the slow query log, usually you find underused or missing indexes.

A very helpful tool is heroku-pg-extras, it can tell you about locks, outliers, unused indexes and "bloat"

Thread Thread
 
coderlog profile image
Xavier

I think learning by need is the best strategy. If no need is there, the brain runs 'D' of its own CRUD operations.

Collapse
 
molly profile image
Molly Struve (she/her)

YES, do it!!!! These past couple of years I have really dug into database intricacies and it has paid off in spades! Not to mention, when every little change you make affects your entire application it is incredibly rewarding.

Personally, I want to learn more about containerization and Ansible. I dabbled in Ansible this year and really enjoyed it.