Ask HN: What engineering trivia earned you the most cred

2 porkbrain 3 5/7/2025, 5:48:18 PM

Is there a specific piece of engineering knowledge that powered you to substantially contribute?

A software engineering example: knowing that Postgres FK doesn't implicitly create an index. Three different projects I joined weren't aware of this and we managed to improve the performance with a negligible amount of effort.

Keen to hear your wins (and make them mine ^^

Comments (3)

austin-cheney · 4h ago

Deeper internal knowledge of WebSockets and HTTP got me my current job.

catlover76 · 19h ago

> knowing that Postgres FK doesn't implicitly create an index.

Damn really lol

What does it do then, just block "breaking" deletes?

porkbrain · 19h ago

You can cascade the deletes in db layer rather than in app layer

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Ask HN: What engineering trivia earned you the most cred

Comments (3)