Food and computers.

Sorry for the fat people as well but i think those is legit.

I am sitting next to this friend of mine in class. She is a bit big. Anyhow.

She opens her laptop and i see her screen. Its dirty. But by dirty i mean fucking dirty. Like brow transparent circle like things all over.

I`m like: “shiiiet， whats that on your screen”.

She: “i am not really sure”.

2 days layer in another class we sit together again and she looks at me with a smile.

She: “look my screen is clean. It was dirty because sometimes o sit in bed and eat chicken then type on my keyboard，so when i close my computer the keys touch the screen and voiiiila!”

Me: “..... Wow”

She was quite proud she had elucidated the problem and did not really understand the meaning of my wow.

There's the possibility that all of you just live inside my head, but it is also considerable that I exist in one of your mind.

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

Having a manager and client and boss who know no programming is frustrating because when they post issues on the repo as bugs and critical but its neither of those, the terms lose all meaning because whats really happening is

THEYRE REALLY BAD AT USING COMPUTERS.

Question:

For a real time chat (web) app. Whats the best technology to use for this? I dont want the chats to have delays or glitches (in case it gets sent but not delivered etc).

Backend stack is java spring boot

How about kafka? Or rabbitmq? Or socket.io? Should i use redis? Should i use AWS SQS? Talking about cloud what AWS tools should i be using to handle this the best way?

Note: it must be scalable. Meaning if i wanted to extend this software more by building a mobile app (aside from web), i should be able to use the same backend easily

Note 2: it is not ONLY a chat app. Chatting is just 1 out of many functionalities. So chatting is not the main component of the project just a side thing

Keep in mind the backend is a microservice architecture etc. Database postgresql.