Assuming your backing store is Postgres, I’d experiment a lot with the various column storage strategies, at various sizes of documents and varying amounts of writes. The TOAST overhead can become a huge bottleneck.
Gmail, Notion, Facebook, are painfully slow on my high-end laptop with gigabit ethernet. Something is wrong in our modern engineering culture.
The others, probably, VCs are incentivized to fund the people who allocate the most resources towards growth and marketing, as long as the app isn't actively on fire investors will actively push you away from allocating resources to make your tech good.
First, lots of server-side code is IO-bound, writing it in Rust vs. Java/C# would barely show any difference in a Monitoring tool, in a real-life scenario.
His authorization system is very limited in scope, of course it can be fast! Get real users and we will see if that will still be fast.
When you are running it in production, even if using Zanzibar's approach of loading everything into memory, you'd still need to handle many aspects he didn't think of, like updates to such permissions, and dealing with sharding etc. Things are always more complex in real life.
And last not but the least, Notion is really fast as it is. I never knew it was slow.
Without bringing any new concept to "Notion", I find it hard to believe this will ever work.
I hope he finds happiness building it though, building is fun!
I've built a Cursor for business users in Rust. Spreadsheets, slideshows, and an agentic loop.
If you're up for it, it would be nice to chat and share stories and vision.
Email is andy at inboard dot ai
From the linked blog.
The only one I'm looking forward currently is the next version of Logseq which will enable collaboration on their existing block-based authoring model.
Here's an alternative.