But think of their resumes. Their performance reviews.

Saying "Improved loading times by fixing our fucked up indexes and query patterns on current database" sounds weak. Sounds *shudder* incremental.

But implementing an in-house database engine for a literal CRUD app? That's takes being a visionary. There's so much bikeshedding for you to stamp down on and show leadership (never mind it's your fault there's any bikeshedding to start)

And I mean the article says it all at the end:

> Looking ahead, we’re weighing up our next moves. We might refactor some of our logic to be executed with highly-performant tech such as DuckDB. We might take advantage of columnar formats such as Arrow and Parquet. We may even refactor our logic using Rust language as a side-car or dedicated microservice. I’m very excited about the future, and will keep you updated!

They're already salivating impact they just unlocked by smashing their fist through the beating heart of what the last guys did and taking a triumphant bite. It's not just this first iteration of the platform: they've given themselves the momentum to start tearing down everything that ever touched a database at that company! This is how you break the IC glass ceiling!!!!

_

And I absolutely love this line: Eventually, we found that none of these options completely met our requirements.

Related tangent: there's an in-house serialization format at the AV company I work at that's been a massive pain in my ass since I got there. I'm one of those evil tech leads that wants to do things that actually measurably deliver value so instead of building a SaaS product inside my tech company I like to do things like build tools with data we have... but it turns out rolling your own not-Protobuf also means having to write your own client libraries! Which means I consistently run into stupid bugs and edge cases that the genius who invented this format doesn't have to deal with because they long impacted their way into a barely-technical role, and now random people get the joy of relearning this guy's invented solution to fix it while they try to get useful things done.

One day I get so annoyed this mess that I go and look up why the fuck someone made their own Protobuf. I dig through old Slack messages until I get to a presentation deck, and that golden nugget almost word for word was sitting there on a slide: none of the existing options completely met our requirements. and on the slide you've got 10 perfectly good solutions like Protobuf, Capt'n Proto, MsgPack...

So what they mean of course is, quite literally, no one checked every single box. There were options that checked 9/10 boxes, but the moment that 10th box wasn't checked... they had their excuse. It's like a toddler hitting you with the "you said sit in my room but you didn't say which room!!!!!"

And of course never mind that "settling" for 9/10 boxes would have enabled an infinitely better solution for the 9 that are checked: because when asked why on earth this project is needed, I'll get to show a nice table with a big red X on every single solution.

_

Now excuse me while I go throw up at the idea of birthing a company with blood sweat and tears only to have it infected with this kind of sickness.

I swear, tech is the only industry where if you walked into a room and asked what one improvement to their work they'd like, it'd be something at odds with your customers:

I can walk into McDonalds and the suggestions will be things like "move appliance X closer to Y so I can do Z that makes my job easier".

If they were tech workers I'd get "replace the coffee machine with a $50,000 italian espresso maker so I can practice for my next job at the Dorsia."