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My Journey from ADO.NET to SQLC

(The Timeline of a Backend Dev Who Grew Up in SQL)

2015–2016: College / OLTP​

  • Learning SQL the old-school way
  • Access DBs, connection drivers, working inside IDEs
  • SQL felt natural — it's basically English
  • Had no clue what an “ORM” was (didn’t need one)

2017–2018: SQL Saturdays & BI Dev​

  • Living in SSMS, Tableau, PowerBI — OLAP mindset
  • Started building local tools → needed persistent storage
  • ADO.NET was the first time I touched SQL from OOP/imperative code
  • Still no ORM — still no problem

2018–2019: First Portfolio Site​

  • Enter EF / EF Core
  • “Okay cool… I don’t have to hand-write ‘DROP ALL TABLES’ anymore”
  • But... all this indirection? This isn’t faster, just different
  • 🧠 My perspective:

    ORMs solve a problem that doesn’t really exist — at the cost of mental overhead

2020: Tried Django​

  • Did a full tutorial — actually liked it
  • But moved on quickly to…

2020–2022: Frontend First Era​

  • Node server serving JSON from files
  • Design-first mindset: "Just return the shape I want"
  • No DB, no ORM, no problem

2024: Django at Work​

  • Real job, real project, real ORM
  • Slowly grew to appreciate the tooling
  • Especially when used with intention and constraints

2024: SQLC Changes Everything​

  • Found SQLC → instant dopamine hit
  • “YES. This is what should be generated. Not your models. Not your views. Just the DB layer.”
  • Write SQL → get safe, typed Go methods
  • Let me own my DDL/DML. Let my code reflect it.

2025: Go vs Django — Developer UX Tradeoffs​

  • Raw Go + SQLC = fast, explicit, but fewer affordances
  • Django = fast scaffolding, but encourages magic
  • Django migrations? Easy
  • Go migrations? Shell script with psql to nuke and reinit 😂, which is ironically exactly what i did in 2018-2019 ADO.NET days... but I wasn't a termit back then
    • Wow cant believe it was late 2024 i found SQLC... its honestly life changing. CHeck out what i was doing before
  • It's not about which is better.
    It's about which one aligns with your brain today.