Mathias Meyer
paperplanes.de · Personal blog · on HN since 2008
Mathias Meyer, a software engineer and former Travis CI executive, writes on databases, operations, engineering culture, and management.
What HN saysHN mostly links his post on Travis CI's minimum vacation policy as an alternative to unlimited vacation, plus older posts on MongoDB durability.
51HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
58stories submitted
1.7Kstory points
2 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy5 people · 675 points · first shared 2014 · 329 comments on HN
- 2The Simple Magic of Consistent Hashing (2011)4 people · 38 points · first shared 2011 · 3 comments on HN
- 3MongoDB, Data Durability and Improvements coming in 1.83 people · 100 points · first shared 2011 · 57 comments on HN
- 4Why Hiring for “Culture Fit” Hurts Your Culture3 people · 44 points · first shared 2015 · 58 comments on HN
- 5Web Operations 101 For Developers2 people · 89 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 6A Collection Of Redis Use Cases2 people · 85 points · first shared 2010 · 12 comments on HN
- 7On Drafting an Engineering Strategy2 people · 73 points · first shared 2020 · 13 comments on HN
- 8What Adopting Blameless Post-Mortems Has Taught Me About Culture2 people · 6 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 9Paperplanes. Why is my team not doing what I expect from them?2 people · 3 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 10A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB1 people · 143 points · first shared 2012 · 30 comments on HN
- 11The Developer is Dead, Long Live the Developer1 people · 61 points · first shared 2014 · 30 comments on HN
- 12Six-ish Months of eBook Sales: Riak Handbook1 people · 54 points · first shared 2012 · 13 comments on HN
- 13EventMachine, How Does It Work?1 people · 49 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 14When to Redis1 people · 39 points · first shared 2009 · 14 comments on HN
- 15Relational Data, Document Databases and Schema Design1 people · 37 points · first shared 2010 · 14 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
aphyr · 2011-02-10
I can't see using MongoDB for any production project. It combines a limited replication/sharding model with a poor single-server durability, lack of tunable CAP constraints, and some surprising performance bottlenecks.
If you want integrity and SQL, use PostGres. If you want volatile speed, use Redis or Membase. If you want a rich data model and excellent durability with limited but highly configurable replication, experiment with Couch. If you want federation, predictable horizontal scaling, and HA, perhaps look at Voldemort, Cassandra, HBase, or Riak. There are a lot of good datastores out there, and chances are one of them fits your needs better.
Edit: I think http://www.paperplanes.de/2011/1/10/mongodb_and_data_durability.html basically sums it up. When the Mongo folks started telling me that kill -9 should never happen to any database, I stopped taking them seriously.
stoneg · 2011-01-28
It's true, we also experienced data loss (several millions of log data caused by dirty shutdown, it's data file is very fragile) issue like this thread http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/browse_thread/thread/d0111…
I found the following two posts very insightful:
1, http://www.mikealrogers.com/2010/07/mongodb-performance-durability/
"This (mongodb's write plolicy) is kind of like using UDP for data that you care about getting somewhere, it’s theoretically faster but the importance of making sure your data gets somewhere and is accessible is almost always more important."
2, http://www.paperplanes.de/2011/1/10/mongodb_and_data_durability.html
"It's okay to accept trade-offs with whatever database you choose to your own liking. However, in my opinion, the potential of losing all your data when you use kill -9 to stop it should not be one of them, nor should accepting that you always need a slave to achieve any level of durability. The problem is less with the fact that it's MongoDB's current way of doing persistence, it's with people implying that it's a seemingly good choice. I don't accept it as such."
s0uthPaw88 · 2015-08-04
Some reports of companies where a change to unlimited vacation caused employees to take less time off:
1. http://www.paperplanes.de/2014/12/10/from-open-to-minimum-vacation-pol…
2. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/07/14/unlimited_vacation_time…
eddiezane · 2015-07-18
I really like Travis CI's take on unlimited vacation time [0]. Probably won't ever catch on in the US though.
0: http://www.paperplanes.de/2014/12/10/from-open-to-minimum-vacation-pol…
hughes · 2015-02-25
How about a "minimum vacation" policy?
http://www.paperplanes.de/2014/12/10/from-open-to-minimum-vacation-pol…
jtfairbank · 2015-01-27
42 floors has an interesting mandatory 2 weeks vacation when you start working there. [0]
Paperplanes has a mandatory minimum vacation policy on top of their unlimited vacation policy, in order to prevent employees from feeling like they can never take a break since there's always more to do (a common issue with unlimited vacation policies).
As for my own startup, we're still super early stage so its "unlimited" but I don't foresee us being able to take a break anytime soon. :/
[0]: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/42-floors-vacation-policy-2013-4
[1]: http://www.paperplanes.de/2014/12/10/from-open-to-minimum-vacation-pol…
roidrage · 2012-07-05
Sure can. I actually wrote a post about how I'm building and publishing the book a while back which has more details on the fulfillment provider as well: http://www.paperplanes.de/2012/1/12/my-publishing-tool-chain.html
slillibri · 2011-02-21
Here is a blog post (not mine) that I keep returning to that contains a pile of links to different Redis uses/use cases. http://www.paperplanes.de/2010/2/16/a_collection_of_redis_use_cases.ht…