henningpeters

> why on earth would you waste precious bytes on schema every time

cbor doesn't prescribe sending schema, in fact there is no schema, like json.

i just switched from protobuf to cbor because i needed better streaming support and find use it quite delightful. losing protobuf schema hurts a bit, but the amount of boilerplate code is actually less than what i had before with nanopb (embedded context). on top of it, i am saving approx. 20% in message size compared to protobuf bc i am using mostly arrays with fixed position parameters.

Nice write-up! Would love to read more about practical experience on sync engines. I am also currently building one for a niche use case: a CRDT based smart home system w/o central component: syncing config and state across several embedded/MCU + mobile via CAN bus and BLE, no Internet. It features a simple ORM and persistence and for dev/debug it runs on macos/Linux. Written in C++ and Dart. Due to memory and other platform constraints I chose to build most of it from scratch. Thought about open sourcing or writing about it, but wondered whether anybody cares given the relative obscure tech stack.

Doesn’t match my experience

Reminds me of a Sten I hired many years ago. He requested (and of course got) an hilariously exotic work setup and spent a ridiculous amount of time on its configuration. Right from the start he expressed his unhappiness with seemingly random office stuff: Every day, sometimes multiple times per day, he would would come to my desk and tell me what was wrong, implying I should fix it right now even though it wasn’t obvious that there was a problem in the first place. He also heavily criticized the code base while the same time wasn’t able to produce anything meaningful. For a couple of weeks we hoped his genius to appear and that we just have to give him more support and time to adjust.

Eventually, a group of female coworkers came forward and complained that he would make them feel uneasy. He would stand behind them watching silently what they were doing.

I don’t remember whether we gave him feedback for this or room to adapt, we’ve let him go the next day.