3 ms·

> Overarchitecture is real Amen. I've been through some interviews where I'm the oldest at the table and they tell me their stack and I try to keep a straight

by keyle 6y ago

> Overarchitecture is real Amen. I've been through some interviews where I'm the oldest at the table and they tell me their stack and I try to keep a straight face. It's hard. Hard to keep a straight face because I'm a genuine honest person with a lot of experience. "We plan to hire 15 people within 3 months and double year after year". Well, yeah, with every acronyms AWS could come up with, using them all for no reasons at all (except S-C-A-L-I-N-G), you could build it all rock solid on a mid-size linode and do it with 5 dudes Expected: world domination, runway blast-off to the moooooon Actual: as many employees as concurrent users, grind for the next 2 years and run out of money Reality test: failed.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Planning for scale that will probably never happen is a specific instance of the YAGNI principle, and no doubt a particularly expensive one.
nicoburns 6y ago
> I've been through some interviews where I'm the oldest at the table and they tell me their stack and I try to keep a straight face. > Well, yeah, with every acronyms AWS could come up with, using them all for no reasons at all (except S-C-A-L-I-N-G), you could build it all rock solid on a mid-size linode and do it with 5 dudes I've been through some interviews where I was the youngest person at the table, but it otherwise sounds like I had a very similar experience to you (they had ~1000 total users - their "scaling issues" were entirely due to poorly architected code). In my case, I politely questioned it during the interview and they actually ended up letting me take over and simplify things.
- keyle 6y ago
  I'm glad to hear that actually, cool ending to that story. I'm yet to see such experience first hand, they're usually too committed down the line.
franklampard 6y ago
Why do you think it’s more cost effective to build a service on linode than just use AWS?
- keyle 6y ago
  It wasn't about the cost effectiveness, it was about the complexity added of 20 different products names cobbled together in a chart representing a tech stack. Sorry that wasn't clear.
  - anthk 6y ago
    This, I'm tired of that. You aren't Google, neither FB, nor Amazon. You won't need it.
josephg 6y ago
Yep. WhatsApp scaled their software with over 10m users per engineer on their team. I read an article a few years ago about how StackOverflow ran (still?) their entire site off just 6 physical computers or something. And before you claim its because they have hand written assembly everywhere - nope. Their code is just clean C#. I adore Kafka - I think its a lovely way to build scalable software. But almost every website out there will never need to scale past what a simple postgres + rails/nodejs/whatever + nginx setup can provide, assuming each of those pieces is set up correctly. And you personally probably aren't working on software at that scale. I personally also suspect we can make the experience of building on top of event sourcing better than the experience of building on top of a traditional database, because decoupling reads from writes gives you more architecture options. But I don't think we're there yet.

by keyle 6y ago

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

Planning for scale that will probably never happen is a specific instance of the YAGNI principle, and no doubt a particularly expensive one.

nicoburns 6y ago

> I've been through some interviews where I'm the oldest at the table and they tell me their stack and I try to keep a straight face. > Well, yeah, with every acronyms AWS could come up with, using them all for no reasons at all (except S-C-A-L-I-N-G), you could build it all rock solid on a mid-size linode and do it with 5 dudes I've been through some interviews where I was the youngest person at the table, but it otherwise sounds like I had a very similar experience to you (they had ~1000 total users - their "scaling issues" were entirely due to poorly architected code). In my case, I politely questioned it during the interview and they actually ended up letting me take over and simplify things.

keyle 6y ago
I'm glad to hear that actually, cool ending to that story. I'm yet to see such experience first hand, they're usually too committed down the line.

franklampard 6y ago

Why do you think it’s more cost effective to build a service on linode than just use AWS?

keyle 6y ago
It wasn't about the cost effectiveness, it was about the complexity added of 20 different products names cobbled together in a chart representing a tech stack. Sorry that wasn't clear.
- anthk 6y ago
  This, I'm tired of that. You aren't Google, neither FB, nor Amazon. You won't need it.

josephg 6y ago

Yep. WhatsApp scaled their software with over 10m users per engineer on their team. I read an article a few years ago about how StackOverflow ran (still?) their entire site off just 6 physical computers or something. And before you claim its because they have hand written assembly everywhere - nope. Their code is just clean C#. I adore Kafka - I think its a lovely way to build scalable software. But almost every website out there will never need to scale past what a simple postgres + rails/nodejs/whatever + nginx setup can provide, assuming each of those pieces is set up correctly. And you personally probably aren't working on software at that scale. I personally also suspect we can make the experience of building on top of event sourcing better than the experience of building on top of a traditional database, because decoupling reads from writes gives you more architecture options. But I don't think we're there yet.