Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
Does anyone have a good comparison of using Gleam vs Elixir in 2024 (i.e. the pros and cons of each)? I've only used Elixir, but definitely curious to tinker with Gleam...
Comment · 2 years ago
Very interesting, I’ll look into it!
Comment · 2 years ago
Thanks for the kind words! And yes, I’d love to productionize this… next time I have a free weekend ;)
Comment · 2 years ago
Author here!

Surprised to see this on the front page again (hello fellow pottery enthusiasts?), but figured this could be a good chance to address some of the comments from the recent discussion [0] since I missed it last time :P

The most common feedback seemed to be, "this is dumb, just use SQLite", which is definitely valid.

This was actually how I initially started building the app (using SQLite), and it worked pretty well. There were a couple reasons I abandoned this approach though: one, whenever I had to uninstall and reinstall the app, the data would get wiped; two, I still had to deal with migrations and other annoying boilerplate; and three, I wanted to be able to share my results with my friends in a read-only web view.

(That being said, I'm also curious to explore how tools like ElectricSQL [1], PowerSync [2], TinyBase [3], etc. play with SQlite to handle some of these issues. At a glance, it just seemed like these would require more time to setup compared to InstantDB [4].)

Another similar comment that popped up a few times was the idea that if I'm trying to model _relational_ data, it would be ridiculous to use anything other than a _relational_ database.

I think that's fair, but I also think it's fair to say a graph database is also "relational" in some sense, or at least "relationship-centric" [5] :)

Either way, I had a lot of fun with this. And I was definitely optimizing more for speed/scrappiness than for doing it The Right Way, so if anyone has any thoughts on how to build stuff faster, I'd love to hear it!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40860116

[1] https://electric-sql.com/

[2] https://www.powersync.com/

[3] https://tinybase.org/

[4] https://www.instantdb.com/

[5] https://aws.amazon.com/compare/the-difference-between-graph-...

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