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> Web development doesn't have many hard problems. It has one serious though. Kind of a strange way to put it but I think I agree with the gist. Scaling is the
by rgbrgb 10y ago
> Web development doesn't have many hard problems. It has one serious though.
Kind of a strange way to put it but I think I agree with the gist. Scaling is the web's hard problem. Building an ever expanding list of features while measuring if users like them and delivering them via cheap computers and tiny pipes is surprisingly difficult. Scaling a rigidly defined web system on it's own generally isn't so hard at this point. One off Twitter clones with a few of T's killer features can be knocked out in a few days with pretty good load scaling properties. But scaling the codebase and architecture from 1 dev, 0 users, and 1 OK feature to XXX users and YYY features users love is really hard to get right. Ideally the 100th feature is as easy as the 10th and you can just add more engineer hours, but more commonly it seems to get exponentially harder to add features as the codebase expands.
- Retric 10y agoSystems always get more complex as you add features. At best you can avoid shooting yourself in the foot, but that's ok because none of your competitors can avoid the same issues.
- rgbrgb 10y agoThe web's hard problem is dealing with that complexity at a speed and scale that is a few orders of magnitude bigger than any other programming environment I can think of. > At best you can avoid shooting yourself in the foot At best we can keep our systems simple, agile, and cut bad features as quickly as we test new ones (every damn day!).
- Retric 10y agoMMO's are vastly more complex than websites. The issue with websites is they are inherently simple, and adding one dimension of complexity is still easy. But, when people continue to underestimate what adding features actually takes they snowball into unmaintainable crap. PS: A single 1ghz CPU with a very fast connection could serve the simplest possible webpage to every single person on the planet in less than 1 day. Scaling is only an issue as you add complexity.