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> Houseparty says its growth had been stymied by the app’s crash, which slowed its ability to introduce new features and attract new users. This is why horizon
by jitix 9y ago
> Houseparty says its growth had been stymied by the app’s crash, which slowed its ability to introduce new features and attract new users.
This is why horizontal scalability should be a basic requirement in such a product. These days there's a blanket statement used throughout the industry that premature optimization is bad. It is bad if you're developing a website or a stand alone mobile app. But if you're doing something in communications field (or data, IoT, etc.) scalability is a must-have.
- Analemma_ 9y agoI think this is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation though. Scalability doesn't come for free, in a small startup it usually costs you velocity (hence: "Do things that don't scale"), and with Facebook breathing down their necks that may not be a luxury they could afford.
- jitix 9y agoBut since video chat is quite commoditized building a scalable system from ground up would have helped them counter facebook by quickly building features on top of what they had. The article itself mentions that they had to stop what they were doing and scale the system. My main point was that one-size-fits-all methodologies don't suit every software project. In some cases it makes sense to build the feature first and then worry about scaling but in some cases like this it doesn't.
- glitcher 9y agooptimization != scalability
- jitix 9y agoOptimization is generally used as a broader term than what code level optimization means. Although code optimization does help systems vertically scale. I've seen quite a few projects fail because the engineers didn't think through the ability of the system for handling more users/connections/data. A little thought before starting the project usually helps avoid ops headache and costly rewrites later.