4 ms·
I had a director who used to say "You know that would be a good problem to have." whenever scaling discussions come up (i.e "How would we handle 10M users?").
by gopalv 7y ago
I had a director who used to say "You know that would be a good problem to have." whenever scaling discussions come up (i.e "How would we handle 10M users?").
And as an engineer, I used to point how Twitter's fail-whale was killing Twitter just before it got popular.
After almost a decade, now I get what he meant. And I'm more interested in jumping into a company with technical problems like these, with short time horizons rather than those with capital restrictions or chasing PMF in early stages.
- melling 7y agoWhat was Twitter’s bottleneck? I remember they were one of the first to really adopt Scala. They still use it quite successfully.
- digianarchist 7y agoI have a vague recollection that Ruby was their bottleneck.
- niyazpk 7y agoRuby may be slower than other languages, but generally speaking your scalability issues will never be solved by rewriting in another language. A rewrite may give you a temporary relief if the runtime of your new language is say 10% faster than your current one. This is not a long term solution though, and for many startups in hyper growth state, this will just give you a few more weeks of runway until you run into the next roadblock. Your solution to scalability issues should almost always be system redesign, not component rewrite.
- marcus_holmes 7y agoThe Fail Whale is always my go-to when explaining why we should ignore scaling until we need to. If people need the solution and love the product, they'll be patient while tech problems are fixed. It's better to create a lovable product than a scalable product.