spicedb VS todomvc

Have you taken a look at SpiceDB? The Authzed blog has a few posts that are useful to improving your understanding -- I can think of two: New Enemies and Writing relationships to SpiceDB.

Things I can't live without in a new Go project in no particular order:

- https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint - meta-linter

- https://goreleaser.com - automate release workflows

- https://magefile.org - build tool that can version your tools

- https://github.com/ory/dockertest/v3 - run containers for e2e testing

- https://github.com/ecordell/optgen - generate functional options

- https://golang.org/x/tools/cmd/stringer - generate String()

- https://mvdan.cc/gofumpt - stricter gofmt

- https://github.com/stretchr/testify - test assertion library

- https://github.com/rs/zerolog - logging

- https://github.com/spf13/cobra - CLI framework

FWIW, I just lifted all the tools we use for https://github.com/authzed/spicedb

We've also written some custom linters that might be useful for other folks: https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/tree/main/tools/analyzers

At AuthZed, we think about this topic regularly while developing SpiceDB[0], except we believe feature flags are a subset of authorization. I'd disagree with the author that permissions are always long-lived -- authorization can also be ephemeral (and often that's how it's most secure) or dependent on run-time context[1]. What's more, using SpiceDB, we can often collapse checking for authorization and feature-flags into a single round-trip by defining a permission that can additionally require a feature flag (e.g. permission = admin & has_feature_flag).

It's a little silly, but lots of folks ask for the moon when it comes to performance for authorization because it's critical to every request, but then go on and sprinkle a dozen feature flag RPCs each adding more and more latency. We think you should be able to have both.

What we're excited about is use cases beyond feature flags and authorization: we've also seen some folks use SpiceDB as an update graph or others as a dependency graph.

[0]: https://github.com/authzed/spicedb

[1]: https://authzed.com/blog/caveats/

It scaled well compared to a naive graph abstraction implemented outside the database, but when performance wasn't great, it REALLY wasn't great. We ended up throwing it out in later versions to try and get more consistent performance.

I've since worked on SpiceDB[1] which takes the traditional design approach for graph databases and simply treating Postgres as triple-store and that scales far better. IME, if you need a graph, you probably want to use a database optimized for graph access patterns. Most general-purpose graph databases are just bags of optimizations for common traversals.

[0]: https://github.com/quay/clair

[1]: https://github.com/authzed/spicedb

I get the sentiment. We held off on building an operator until we felt there was actually value in doing so (for the most part, Deployments cover the operational needs pretty well).

Migrations can be run in containers (and they are, even with the operator), but it's actually a lot of work to run them at the right time, only once, with the right flags, in the right order, waiting for SpiceDB to reach a specific spot in a phased migrations, etc.

Moving from v1.13.0 to v1.14.0 of SpiceDB requires a multi-phase migration to avoid downtime[0], as could any phased migration for any stateful workload. The operator will walk you through them correctly, without intervention. Users who aren't running on Kubernetes or aren't using the operator often have problems running these steps correctly.

The value is in this automation, but also in the API interface itself. RDS is just some automation and an API on top of EC2, and I think RDS has value over running postgres on EC2 myself directly.

As for helm charts, this is just my opinion, but I don't think they're a good way to distribute software to end users. The interface for a helm chart becomes polluted over time in the same way that most operator APIs become polluted over time, as more and more configuration is pulled up to the top. I think helm is better suited to managing configuration you write yourself to deploy on your own clusters (I realize I'm in the minority here).

[0]: https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/releases/tag/v1.14.0

To my understanding, the only ReBAC system that supports dynamic attributes is SpiceDB.

If you're curious to see a Postgres-based implementation, SpiceDB has a Postgres driver: https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/tree/main/internal/datast...

Interesting, for SpiceDB[0], one place we've struggled with MySQL is preemptively establishing connections in the pool so that it's always full. PGX[1] has been fantastic for Postgres and CockroachDB, but I haven't found something with enough control for MySQL.

[0]: https://github.com/authzed/spicedb

The odd thing is unison started purely as a language. Now there's a platform.

I often find the best way to understand complex things is to dig all the way back to when they were being thought up. In this case there's a blog post from 2017 that I still find useful when thinking about Unison:

https://pchiusano.github.io/2017-01-20/why-not-haskell.html

Key quote:

Composability is destroyed at program boundaries, therefore extend these boundaries outward, until all the computational resources of civilization are joined in a single planetary-scale computer

(With the open sourcing of the language I doubt it will be one computer anymore, but it's an interesting window into the original idea)

Personally I find there's a lot to this. It's interesting that we're really, really good at composing code within a program. I can map, filter, loop and do whatever I want to nested data structures with complete type safety to my heart's content. My editor's autocompleting, docs are showing up on hover, it's easy to test, all's well.

But as soon as I want cron involved, and maybe a little state-- this is all wrecked. Also deployment gets more annoying as they talk about a lot.

So I think Unison always had to have a platform to support bringing this stuff into the language, even though they built the language first.

I'd love to hear some opinions from outside Unison about how they like using this language, tooling and hosting.

I'd like to hear this too.

Also, it would be great if there was something like https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/ or https://todomvc.com/ for platforms that we could use to compare Unison, AWS, etc etc. Or is there already a 7GUIs for platforms that I don't know about?

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc.git

The problem with this question is that, if it's not engineering, what is it? A better question is motivated by studying the history of chemistry and its progenitor, alchemy. That is: is software development alchemy or chemistry?

Software development alchemy. Just like alchemy, software dev is not standardized, everyone has their own idiosyncratic naming systems, classifications and rules-of-thumb. Like alchemists, software engineers are often jealous of their proprietary knowledge. Just like alchemists, they admired, feared and loathed for having secret knowledge. And just like alchemists, you have to be exceedingly brilliant to work in such a chaotic field and get anything done.

What changed alchemy into chemistry, and what is the analog to that in software? Arguably the change started with notion of conservation of mass and energy, and the development of the periodic table (thanks to Lavoisier and Mendeleev, respectively). As for what that analog is for software, first we need a characterization of the field. With alchemy and chemistry both, it's essentially mixing stuff together, heating and cooling it, and seeing what happens. But what is it for software?

Software engineering is often mistaken for computer science. Computer science is a tiny subset of software engineering. In practice, almost all of computer science is encapsulated in a few, tiny standard libraries - the places where bubble-sorts and hash maps live. (This mistake is consistent, and leads to "leet code" style interview questions which are irrelevant to actual work). I'd characterize software engineering as the set of solutions to a boundary value problem[0] described as "a set of interacting screens with behaviors pleasing to humans". The current solutions to this problem have been idiosyncratically shaped by resource constraints that rapidly relaxed over time[1], and characterized by elements discovered at random by necessity: e.g. kernels, processes, files, procedures, terminals, etc. In this analysis "language" functions as a kind of "coordinate system" as in physics[2][3], within which each of these elements are described, and within which elements are combined to make new elements, which eventually yield a solution to the boundary problem (which is termed "application").

I don't particularly know what the standardization of software engineering will look like, but I'm certain that this analysis, or something similar to it, is the first steps in the right direction. Personally, I look forward to the day we can shed the considerable weight of our alchemical origins.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_value_problem

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinate_system

3 - https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code - the same problem is solved in many languages. For applications: https://todomvc.com/

Compare the source code at https://todomvc.com/ to see what various frameworks bring to the table. VanillaJS is generally 2-3x as much code since you have to implement the MVC logic yourself.

There is an example (not mine) of AnjularJS controllers, how much JS I have to write:https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/gh-pages/architecture-examples/angularjs/js

Learn by doing. You could recreate the TodoMVC app.

How easy or hard to build Shopify without zero coding experience? Shopify is a big thing =) So that would be hard to build with zero coding experience. Start with a todo list, micro blog, or something small in scope that interests you. https://todomvc.com/ is interesting since it is the identical app, written in many different ways, different languages and frameworks - and you can use them as reference to see how others have built something.