Hacker News Effect Findings

After read the excellent blog post from Dan McKinley on his blog about why MongoDB never worked out at Etsy giving us solid arguments about the difficulties on having more than one production database, Hackers News was flooded by comments, great ones with brilliant usage insights and the usual haters gonna hate kind of comments. I just wanted to record what I thought at this moment and submitted it to Hacker News, never thinking on been featured on the first page of it for a few minutes.

This blog is not commercial nor related to my company. It’s just a personal space which I write about important moments related to my young career and my first steps on the entrepreneurial world. Just to have a historical path for me and go back on them when I’m making the same mistakes I’ve made on the past. All other posts are in Portuguese, my native language as I’m Brazilian.

Findings:

• The average number of daily unique visitors from the previous six months was 3. On the last two days, the number of unique visitors jumped to 8,426. 2,808x more people visiting this humble personal blog.

• Exactly the half of this audience - 4,213 people - are located on United States. Followed by people from UK, Canada, Germany and France.

• 3,509 people came from Hacker News’ site. From the others 4,917, 2,517 came directly and 1,297 came from Twitter shorted links (t.co), followed by others tech news aggregators.

• 5 people commented on the entry here, 3 of them cursing me, my country and the ugliness of my name - and yes, one of them really thinks Brazil official language is Spanish. It’s Portuguese as we’re colonized by Portugal and all other Latin Amercia countries by Spain. The other 2 comments are related to MongoDB itself, 1 saying all MongoDB professionals are amateurs and unprepared (comparing it with PHP ecosystem, with the old, poor and biased arguments that PHP only have the worst professionals on the Earth) and the other one blaming 10gen from be aggresive on its marketing efforts, promoting MongoDB benefits and hiding its weaknesses. As I previously knew a lot of histories about offenses and flame wars related to MongoDB’s love and hate feelings, I disabled the publicity of all comments on this thread before posting it.

The main goal of my previous post was just to register to myself to never jumps into a new technology thinking on it as the Holy Grail or The Silver Bullet, using MongoDB as an example. It’s not a technical compendium of MongoDB strenghts and weaknesses neither a psychological study about MongoDB users’ abilities or behavior.

And based on all attention its received, I’ll never forget: one size does not fit all ;)