Thanks so much for posting this! This was one of the most technically interesting projects I have worked on and was a great opportunity to learn a huge amount about scaling systems.
In order to make running the crowdfunding easier for ourselves we added new tools for load shedding, optimised our apps to reduce the number of API calls and prepared crowdfunding specific runbooks. These steps made a huge difference on the day. Hopefully you all manage to learn something from our experience.
For context Monzo is a bank in the UK and last month we crowdfunded £20 million from 36,000 users through our own platform. We run the bank on our own software stack using Kubernetes & AWS, which we used for crowdfunding too.
If you have any questions please do let me know and I will do my best to answer them!
Thanks for the feedback, I try to keep GoRethink up to date and to the same high standards as the official drivers. That being said I can understand why you would want an official driver.
Regarding the json support the driver actually uses the native package however due to RethinkDBs use of psuedo-types an extra decoding step is needed and that is why GoRethink doesnt let you use json tags directly. Regarding your other ideas it would be great to discuss them.
I hope to have a "production ready" version of the driver ready in about a month. I know its slow but currently I am the only dev working on maintaining this project and all work is done in my free time.
Just released the latest update to the Go driver, it has some pretty big changes including the ability to connect to a RethinkDB cluster + automatic host discovery.
I have been using RethinkDB for a while now (although mostly for small side projects + maintaining the Go driver https://github.com/dancannon/gorethink) and have really enjoyed it, having a functional query language is quite refreshing. The recent introduction of change feeds are also really cool, building a realtime app with websockets was surprisingly easy.
Honestly I would recommend RethinkDB to anybody looking to start a new (small-medium sized) project. While there are some small performance issues this is to be expected for a project at this early stage and after seeing how the RethinkDB team works I am confident that these will be sorted pretty quickly.
Yeah this is because I encode from json string > interface{} > final data structure. This is so that I can process any psuedo-types such as times.
I am now looking to do this whole process in a much simpler way in the next release which will solve the issue mentioned by evmar. I think its also worth mentioning that both RethinkDB and my driver are not yet production ready but both projects are getting there.
Yeah there was an unfortunate bug with how I was encoding values being sent to the database. I understand that it was frustrating and fixes should be coming soon.
That being said this update brings a couple of great new features and I look forward to see what else comes.
So I am about to finish university in a couple of months and I have been using Go for the past year. Would it be a good idea to go to this conference or maybe wait a bit longer before I have more experience/money?
In order to make running the crowdfunding easier for ourselves we added new tools for load shedding, optimised our apps to reduce the number of API calls and prepared crowdfunding specific runbooks. These steps made a huge difference on the day. Hopefully you all manage to learn something from our experience.
For context Monzo is a bank in the UK and last month we crowdfunded £20 million from 36,000 users through our own platform. We run the bank on our own software stack using Kubernetes & AWS, which we used for crowdfunding too.
If you have any questions please do let me know and I will do my best to answer them!