Maybe it's the "me first" mindset you're bringing to engineering?

no ones upset, I think given the quality of technical write ups we see on HN with very detailed analysis that this article felt like a faux tech article to promote a product? But it kind of is a self own as it just looks like they didn't do due diligence with their tech choices.

I mean, mostly it just comes off as egregious self-indulgence to try one thing and then jump to "we built the solution ourselves!" when the problem is not novel at all. These things are just tiresome.

This sounds more like a 5 month POC that the engineer should have been able to prove sooner that DucksDB didn’t fit the use case.

> Engineers like to experiment

The job of management is to help manage that. Typically, the desire to experiment is constrained to lab environments and so on. Experimenting on your actual users carries a lot of risks - to product stability, customer relations, market perception, etc.