The funny thing about Hacker News (and most other places) is that if you explain everything you end up writing a tome that nobody ends up reading.
That is to say, I completely agree with you. Google Reader had an excellent backend (being used by 90%+ of people meant there was a virtuous cycle happening), and I especially noticed this when I developed a prototype backend that I never actually used. Deciding how frequently to check feeds is complicated.
In the end, given that this is a side project, I'm never going to be able to compete with the big players, especially at scale, and to be frank, I don't find this side of it as interesting or enjoyable to develop.
The good news is that this frontend could be modified to work with another backend if there was a good reason to do so.
A lot of the major feeds out there don't even return valid RSS or atom. So, the problem begins when you have to start adding heuristics to your parser just to get it right.
That is to say, I completely agree with you. Google Reader had an excellent backend (being used by 90%+ of people meant there was a virtuous cycle happening), and I especially noticed this when I developed a prototype backend that I never actually used. Deciding how frequently to check feeds is complicated.
In the end, given that this is a side project, I'm never going to be able to compete with the big players, especially at scale, and to be frank, I don't find this side of it as interesting or enjoyable to develop.
The good news is that this frontend could be modified to work with another backend if there was a good reason to do so.