Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation. It’s much more valuable to walk away with the heuristic “some dude got a 300x memory reduction by swapping out a database he hacked together for a tiny, static, specialized data structure that does exactly what he needs it to and no more.”
  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    14 days ago

    the whole reason it was possible to experiment cheaply and come across this serendipity was because 9 months ago, faced with the choice to either do the bad easy thing or the good nothing, I chose to do the bad easy thing. The SQLite database worked! I understood how it worked, behind the scenes with its B-trees and its Full Text Search extension.

    I always wonder what the tradeoffs are for using SQLite for personal projects… being a stepping-stone to rolling your own non-sql alternatives is one I hadn’t thought of.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
      4·
      14 days ago

      And I find this extends to a more general principle of just pushing through solving a problem in order to understand it. Then once you’ve done that work, you can find a much better solution. It’s easy to get stuck in an analysis paralysis loop where you try to come up with the perfect solution up front, but it’s rarely possible to do for something you’re doing for the first time. Doing a ‘dumb’ thing like making a giant mysql db that gets you to a working result is the right way to go about it.