Top all-time · #2937
Nemil Dalal
Personal blog · nemil.comcareerstartups
Nemil Dalal writes nemil, a personal blog at nemil.com about career and startups. Since 2015, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 103 times, most often “Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Nemil Dalal's writing mainly for its three-part series on MongoDB's marketing and why Mongo won, and a piece on chasing shiny new technology. Commenters cite these posts to support their views on MongoDB.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
About Me: Visiting Partner at Y Combinator (LinkedIn, X) Previously, built the future of crypto: helping lead USDC to $1 BN, leading Coinbase's asset strategy, launching staking, managing billions of dollars in funds through secure wallet tech, leading developer products (cdp.coinbase.com), and laun
Most-linked posts?
- Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-07-06
- Four Startup Engineering Killers4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-02-22
- Beware Engineering Media4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-06-21
- The Marketing Behind MongoDB3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-08-29
- Startup Engineers and Our Mistakes with MongoDB3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-07-19
- How to Hack an Engineer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-22
- Visualizing the Coverage of Deaths in The New York Times vs. Actual Death Data2 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2017-02-23
- Chasing the shiny and new2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-09-25
- Better Software Engineering Debates2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-12-13
- Inside The Bubble at Facebook2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-06-04
What Hacker News says?
I think you'll enjoy the series then, I spent several months investigating and made the same point about JSON and the Javascript-like CLI (plus great Node support, plus savvy marketing). For example: > 10gen's key contributions to databases — and to our industry — was their laser focus on four critical things: onboarding, usability, libraries and support. For startup teams, these were important factors in choosing M…
Comment linking /mongo/3.html
on “Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres”Submitted The Marketing Behind MongoDB as a story · 322 points
HN discussionThe Guardian example was heavily used by MongoDB as a case study to pitch their database to others in 2011: https://www.mongodb.com/customers/guardian https://www.mongodb.com/presentations/mongodb-guardian https://www.slideshare.net/tackers/why-we-chose-mongodb-for-... And reupping my previous, three-part series on MongoDB: On MongoDB NoSQL databases were the future. MongoDB was the database for "modern" web enginee…
Comment linking /mongo/index.html
on “Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres”Submitted Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? as a story · 102 points
HN discussionAgreed. A favorite quote: “[E]verybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus For a long time, my bias was to write code when faced with a problem, without realizing the debt I was taking on and the other solutions available. https://www.nemil.com/on-software-engineering/dont-write-cod...
Comment linking /on-software-engineering/dont-write-code.html
on “Choose Boring Technology”Submitted Startup Engineers and Our Mistakes with MongoDB as a story · 94 points
HN discussionI would go for it, but just the fact that you're asking shows that you're less susceptible to injecting needless technology. Typescript has also been used for years, and it has a place as Javascript is used for more complex products than it was intended. I wrote a short bit in "Handling Hype" here arguing that you need to dig into your problem, assess claims, and weigh tradeoffs: https://www.nemil.com/mongo/1.html
Comment linking /mongo/1.html
on “Choose Boring Technology”Submitted Chasing the shiny and new as a story · 66 points
HN discussionAn older piece that I loved is Dan's point on just allowing a certain number of technology tokens in any project: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology I think one big part of the mistake is using Hacker News, Reddit, conferences as a sign of what companies are actually using. Instead, I liken it to a bazaar: https://www.nemil.com/on-software-engineering/beware-enginee... Oh, and remember marketing is not re…
Comment linking /mongo/3.html
on “Choose Boring Technology”Submitted Better Software Engineering Debates as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThanks for sharing! I empathize with a lot of what you said. I wrote about my own challenges with ethics in software (and added your comment as a citation): https://www.nemil.com/musings/software-engineers-and-ethics.... While it may not affect current employees, I do think vivid stories like this make the allure of joining Facebook less compelling for the next generation of programmers. It also may influence just a…
Comment linking /musings/software-engineers-and-ethics.html
on “Facebook Security Chief Said to Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation”Submitted How to Hack an Engineer as a story · 6 points
HN discussionOn a related note, a few years ago, I went through an entire year of top headlines in the New York Times (top few pages), and mapped them against actual death rates: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html It's obvious that these would be different, but it was especially glaring just how much we focused on intentional deaths in our media coverage. It also makes sense that this is newsworthy (aka profitable),…
Comment linking /s/part3-horror-films.html
on “Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes”Submitted Better Software Engineering Debates as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI loved this quote: > “Employees are wising up to the fact that you can have a mission statement on your website, but when you’re looking at how the company creates new products or makes decisions, the correlation between the two is not so tightly aligned,” said David Chie, the head of Palo Alto Staffing, a tech job placement service in Silicon Valley. “Everyone’s having this conversation.” I call these anodyne miss…
Comment linking /snippets/beware-false-mission.html
on “‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students”Submitted Beware Burnout as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis. Here's a piece that I wrote that touches on this dissonance: What Open Source Can Learn From Slack https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html > Third, we generally overweight the importance of our personal values when developing a product — without considering how users will make their decision. > For example, users do value privacy, but many won’t switch to a product that protects their privacy if it me…
Comment linking /musings/oss-and-slack.html
on “Facebook Still Tracks People on Yelp, Duolingo, Indeed”Submitted Four Startup Engineering Killers as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYes, but the partisanship is likely getting worse, because we each individually get the exact information that is "relevant" to us and therefore feeds our confirmation bias. It's a different form of tribalism from 1950s mass media partisanship. There's actually research (James Hamilton @ Stanford) that shows when capital costs for printing presses were higher, newspapers became less partisan because you had to appea…
Comment linking /s/part2-terrorism.html
on “Zuckerberg’s Rules Would Hurt Everyone but Facebook”Submitted Inside The Bubble at Facebook as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI took a Master in Margarita class in college during my study abroad, with each class physically exploring a key Moscow scene from the novel. Our first class started at Патриаршие пруды (Patriarch's Pond), near where Anushka drops the oil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Ponds Now years later, I do data analysis to show how media can give us a skewed view of the world — and can be used to manipulate our beli…
Comment linking /s/part2-terrorism.html
on “Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita”Submitted Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis last came up for OSS and Slack (e.g., "Please don't use Slack for FOSS")[1][2]. I took some time to reflect on why OSS wasn't the default for these messaging tools, rather than proprietary alternatives — and what it would take to make more users use OSS alternatives: > As Slack has continued to grow, open source developers have had lengthy debates about using it rather than IRC. For some, the fact that Slack is…
Comment linking /musings/oss-and-slack.html
on “Discord is not an acceptable choice for free software projects”Submitted Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think every cohort of software engineers learns this in their own way. I wrote this three years ago. Chasing the Shiny and New in Software https://www.nemil.com/musings/shinyandnew.html “I worry that some programmers (and their employers) have this attitude, namely a focus on transitioning stacks to the newest. They pick companies primarily based on the framework, aiming for the latest instead of the best tool for…
Comment linking /musings/shinyandnew.html
on “Stop Learning Frameworks”Submitted Beware Engineering Media as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere's a lot of debates about this. Here's a view by a partner at YCombinator in the context of new company: http://blog.jaredfriedman.com/2015/09/15/why-i-wouldnt-use-r... I have a different general philosophy: https://www.nemil.com/musings/shinyandnew.html My own bias is to pick the best tool for the job, and not risk hype dictating your decisions. If you're learning for fun and personal learning, that' s great -…
Comment linking /musings/shinyandnew.html
on “The Rails Doctrine”Submitted Startup Engineering Killers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI emailed you. For everyone else, here’s a rough article I’m writing on reading code for my Notes to a Young Software Engineer series: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q5mtxxk6bswkag6/Read%20Code.pdf?dl... https://www.nemil.com/on-software-engineering/index.html (The article has a few great HN threads on reading code; after all, there are lots of contexts where you need to read without working someone in person who’s been…
Comment linking /on-software-engineering/index.html
on “Ask HN: How to learn best practices when you have no one to teach you?”Submitted Visualizing the Coverage of Deaths in The New York Times vs. Actual Death Data as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
