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Greenspun had some great thoughts on this in 2009: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-and-the-importance-of-being-stupid/ http://blogs.

Greenspun had some great thoughts on this in 2009: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-and-the-importance-of-being-stupid/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-... Business Guy: Hands Microsoft a bunch of money, launches site on an ASP server with 64GB RAM. He is basically done with IT for the first few years of growth. MIT Genius: Starts off trying to build a system that will scale, from the beginning. He creates about 6 months of IT work for himself. It works, eventually, but it was a lot harder than what the business guy had to do.

simonw 15y ago
Smart startup founder: bangs out a prototype with Rails or Django in a few hours / couple of days, sticks it on a $20/month VPS somewhere, sees what happens.
- daliusd 15y ago
  Smart Simon Willison: goes to programming conference with slogan "smart hackers, we need you" (or something like that) and sees how everyone implements it. Really, you have inspired me to write trac openid plugin :-) Overall smart plan looks good in many cases but there are things you can't prototype in couple of days. E.g. dropbox or rescuetime like services. If you do it poor nobody will care. Should you make conclusion that nobody cares? I have personally written rescuetime like program for myself but have not seen bussiness oportunity there. Actually I have not cared about that at all and friends to whom I shown it have not proposed to make bussiness out of it.
clyfe 15y ago
I read the article, in the Rails example conclusion is: no eager loading and in-memory paging. I'd rather call it "MIT Retard" not "MIT Genius". These are basic principles!
evilduck 15y ago
Not sure that I would call that post "great thoughts". Scenario #1 (business guy) required a significant amount of initial investment, Scenario #2 (MIT Genius) could have bootstrapped the site for $14/mo on AWS. They're two completely different strategies.

simonw 15y ago

Smart startup founder: bangs out a prototype with Rails or Django in a few hours / couple of days, sticks it on a $20/month VPS somewhere, sees what happens.

daliusd 15y ago
Smart Simon Willison: goes to programming conference with slogan "smart hackers, we need you" (or something like that) and sees how everyone implements it. Really, you have inspired me to write trac openid plugin :-) Overall smart plan looks good in many cases but there are things you can't prototype in couple of days. E.g. dropbox or rescuetime like services. If you do it poor nobody will care. Should you make conclusion that nobody cares? I have personally written rescuetime like program for myself but have not seen bussiness oportunity there. Actually I have not cared about that at all and friends to whom I shown it have not proposed to make bussiness out of it.

clyfe 15y ago

I read the article, in the Rails example conclusion is: no eager loading and in-memory paging. I'd rather call it "MIT Retard" not "MIT Genius". These are basic principles!

evilduck 15y ago

Not sure that I would call that post "great thoughts". Scenario #1 (business guy) required a significant amount of initial investment, Scenario #2 (MIT Genius) could have bootstrapped the site for $14/mo on AWS. They're two completely different strategies.