Nemil Dalal

I'd argue with mongo a lot of people use it because it has fantastic marketing. https://nemil.com/2017/08/29/the-marketing-behind-mongodb/

On a related note, a few years ago, I went through an entire year of top headlines in the New York Times (top few pages), and mapped them against actual death rates: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html It's obvious that these would be different, but it was especially glaring just how much we focused on intentional deaths in our media coverage. It also makes sense that this is newsworthy (aka profitable), but it leads to some terrible inferences and decisions if that's all we see.

I recommend reading this 3-part series on Mongo's marketing - it goes into a lot of detail why Mongo "won". https://www.nemil.com/mongo/1.html As a former RethinkDB user (we have migrated to Postgres) I actually don't miss it as much as I would - JSONB in PG does what we need, and the real-time features of RethinkDB never really delivered because of various performance issues in the database itself.

It was picked up due to merit, IMNSHO, just not the for the factors you think highly of. It didn't do ACID, not even nearly, but it did other praiseworthy things, with "laser focus on four critical things: onboarding, usability, libraries and support" (https://www.nemil.com/mongo/2.html). Please don't be disparaging about any of those four.

> I have to admit them a certain respect for executing their strategy so successfully. But be certain not to conflate your respect as a business strategist with your judgment as a mindful developer. To speak clearly: By systematically playing a weak spot of ours [1] they have used countless of small teams as a stepping stone to sell their business contracts to large players, while hurting a lot of these small teams with an (at the time) inappropriate product for their needs. And through these huge costs they still made a product that is inferior to one that was designed properly. As a community (both as a startup, as well as a developer community) we should resent these tactics and try to find ways to protect us against players that abuse the common good of mindshare. And lest you say, that is the price you have to pay to at all get a product like MongoDB in harsh business environments: We could also lobby for open source funds that are organized like research funds, producing fundamental technology that benefit everyone. Not every technology fits the model of for-profit startup innovation. [1] Our community has very little defenses against marketing that comes from our midst, aiming to produce the (false) impression that a disproportionate amount of our fellows have evaluated the product and found it to be excellent. See https://www.nemil.com/mongo/3.html for a discussion about MongoDb specifically (HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15124306 )

Ha! To anyone who believes this, I encourage you to checkout this series of blog posts: https://www.nemil.com/mongo/1.html

I hate and fear lots of technologies. When you struggle against a bad technology decision at a company for weeks, months, or years, hatred/fear is justifiable. Luckily, I don't care what "companies all over the globe" are doing. I'm paid to know the difference between cargo-cult decisions and good decisions. Interesting to see Mongo's (in)famous marketing in action again, though![1] I'll stick to equally-or-more popular products that succeeded on technical merits instead of marketing (e.g. Postgres). 1. https://www.nemil.com/mongo/3.html

> early on the message they conveyed was that document databases were here to replace RDBMSs. The CTO still thinks so. Quote[0]: "MongoDB's CTO disagrees with this statement arguing that nearly 90% of database installations today would benefit from being replaced with MongoDB" [0]: https://www.nemil.com/mongo/2.html

Some similar articles and threads: - Choose Boring Technology: http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology, comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291215 - Chasing the Shiny and New: https://www.nemil.com/musings/shinyandnew.html, discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279008 - Tech is moving too fast for me, I'm out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7947551 etc. I especially liked the first one, which described the idea of "innovation tokens": every startup or project gets three innovation tokens. If you decide to use a new development language, you've just spent one. A new framework, you've just spent another, and so on. If you spend more than three, your chances of launching reach epsilon. I find that as I'm getting to be an older (and older, sigh...) developer, I'm also more and more reluctant to keep throwing away all of the knowledge and hard-won skills I've developed in favor of picking up new ones. It seems enormously, almost criminally wasteful. How many times should I throw away tens of thousands of lines of code in polished, battle-tested libraries, and knowledge of edge cases and gotchas and little efficiencies and everything else, so that I can start over again with a blank slate and a new language and a long road of new bugs and edge cases to learn? No other industry is as wasteful in terms of talent expended than ours is. Imagine if every single bridge ever built in this country was torn down and replaced every five years…