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

  1. 1
    Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy
    5 people · 675 points · first shared 2014 · 329 comments on HN
  2. 2
    The Simple Magic of Consistent Hashing (2011)
    4 people · 38 points · first shared 2011 · 3 comments on HN
  3. 3
    MongoDB, Data Durability and Improvements coming in 1.8
    3 people · 100 points · first shared 2011 · 57 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Why Hiring for “Culture Fit” Hurts Your Culture
    3 people · 44 points · first shared 2015 · 58 comments on HN
  5. 5
    Web Operations 101 For Developers
    2 people · 89 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
  6. 6
    A Collection Of Redis Use Cases
    2 people · 85 points · first shared 2010 · 12 comments on HN
  7. 7
    On Drafting an Engineering Strategy
    2 people · 73 points · first shared 2020 · 13 comments on HN
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
    A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB
    1 people · 143 points · first shared 2012 · 30 comments on HN
  11. 11
    The Developer is Dead, Long Live the Developer
    1 people · 61 points · first shared 2014 · 30 comments on HN
  12. 12
    Six-ish Months of eBook Sales: Riak Handbook
    1 people · 54 points · first shared 2012 · 13 comments on HN
  13. 13
    EventMachine, How Does It Work?
    1 people · 49 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
  14. 14
    When to Redis
    1 people · 39 points · first shared 2009 · 14 comments on HN
  15. 15
    Relational Data, Document Databases and Schema Design
    1 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…
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…

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