What Happened to Lee

I posted this hours ago and then stepped away. The story captures so much about the Lee I knew so well. I'll add one piece of praise for Lee's early architecture of Cloudflare.

Everything was controlled by a single Postgres database that made very heavy use of stored procedures, that called other procedures, that called others. It was one giant program inside the database. It took me a while to comprehend what he'd done but it was really great. The database ran everything and all those functions made sure that audit logs were kept, that the calls were allowed for the user ID being passed in, and some of these procedures made external calls to APIs including getting things like SSL certificates.

It was a magnificent monolith inside a database.

I worked on the periphery of the database (it was truly Lee's domain) and he'd tell me what output to expect or API to create and I'd code to his spec. and we'd just hook it up.

If any single artefact represents what he did at Cloudflare, it's that database. And he used to code it on a laptop we called "The Beast" because it was so crazily heavy and overloaded with memory etc. that he'd carry around a mini, test Cloudflare wherever he went.

Working with stored procedures is just the pits. I wonder why you would describe that as "great". Maybe it's optimized, but so would be a giant executable written in assembly.

I've found the opposite. It can take a long time to get your head into that space but it produces much more maintainable and robust systems in my experience.

I have a similar experience. I've worked with a product that consists of tens of thousands of stored procedures implementing all business logic. Because you are right next to the data you can get away with doing many thing you would have not otherwise.

Also it acted like a barrier, the core team who understood the business well worked on the stored procedures, keeping things fast and stable.

Another team was doing the tech to interface with the database and UX/UI was then implemented in various technologies in parallel and changed/got recycled every few years to whatever was in fashion.

The difference in culture between the two teams was huge, it seemed to work out well in their case.