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"I want to make things that don’t scale." In my experience, software built around this mindset is oftentimes better than software built by large corporations a
by dorfwald 3y ago
"I want to make things that don’t scale."
In my experience, software built around this mindset is oftentimes better than software built by large corporations anyway. Software usually just gets worse with size.
The platonic ideal is a piece of open-source software that a user-developer can understand completely in an afternoon or less.
- amiantos 3y agoI recently built an iOS app that is fully stand-alone. No internet connection needed. It helps you build choose your own adventure books, and when you're done it exports a text file with your book formatted as JSON, so others can import it into the app to play it. This app is infinitely scalable, literally every person on earth could be using it at the same time with no infrastructure problems. So, I just find this sort of statement confusing ("I want to make things that don't scale."). Maybe I am defining "scale" wrong, my interpretation is that a product that can scale can be used concurrently by many users without structurally collapsing in some way. In that way, for much of software history, "scale" has not been a concern. Also, in this context, "I want to make things that don't scale"... doesn't that just mean "I want to make internet services that break if they get too many users?"