In every aspect of your life you are using tools that you don't understand or couldn't build yourself. So the question is - how far down the stack of life shou

In every aspect of your life you are using tools that you don't understand or couldn't build yourself. So the question is - how far down the stack of life should you go? And as far as I've learnt in this life the answer always seems to be: as far as you need to. Which of course - is no answer at all. How far you need to go down the stack depends on what you're trying to achieve - the particular stack you're working on, the difficulty of acquiring the skills... and so on. Perhaps your anxiety comes from the fact that when using a framework that you don't understand you don't know how to fix stuff when things go wrong - when your app needs to scale... etc. I guess you have to try to make an assessment of the risks you face in this respect. Perhaps do research on apps similar to yours and the technologies they used. But in general - much of the comments I've read here on HN about scaling and whatnot seem to suggest that it's something that you can only learn to deal with by living through it since every application scales differently. I don't know - I use Django and haven't faced these problems. I choose not to fret about what might happen because there is too much to worry about in the here and now.