3 ms·

I had a friend who read this essay and understood it as “Don't do things that scale.”

switchbak 1y ago
I think there's nuance missing from his take that people gloss over. To me it's more like "don't over-invest on the early thing you're going to throw away". That implies that: - You're making a thing, and making it quickly - optimizing for rapid market/customer feedback - You're making it in such a way that you can replace it - You have real plans and a sincere intention to actually replace it if you start to scale I have no problem with those, but what I see at a bunch of startups is: - Make a thing, don't worry about paining yourself into a corner because "we're moving fast" - The thing hobbles along, the product gets some interest - It's incredibly hard to maintain, replace or otherwise improve - Original authors leave to other pastures because this isn't fun any more - Other folks come along and have to work miracles to try to undo the gordian knots that were made In other words: I like the idea of moving fast early on. Duct tape programming, love it. We also have to pay attention to the long term impacts of the decisions we're making. Some things are easy to fix/replace/undo, others are brutally hard. Say you write a prototype in {Ruby/Python/Perl/??}, now you have mass adoption and you rewrite a slow part of it in {sexy_modern_language}. That's great. Say instead that you decided to store all of your data in some bizarre format, hosted on IPFS, accessed via bittorrent, through an onion network, via ZModem, with CORBA - and you bake this in to such a degree that it's intermingled everywhere. Now you have a dilema: - you have a business, making money - you have increasing interest - you have a system that's effectively impossible to change or reason about - you can't really improve things to match the customer interest - you're wedded to the design because things are so interwoven - your only option is essentially a ground-up redesign and rewrite Now - if the product is simple enough, rewrite away! (think early Twitter), but if it's not? Good luck to you. I've seen this pattern more times than I haven't, and I think it deserves more nuanced thought and care when it comes to the economics at play.

I think there's nuance missing from his take that people gloss over. To me it's more like "don't over-invest on the early thing you're going to throw away". That implies that: - You're making a thing, and making it quickly - optimizing for rapid market/customer feedback - You're making it in such a way that you can replace it - You have real plans and a sincere intention to actually replace it if you start to scale I have no problem with those, but what I see at a bunch of startups is: - Make a thing, don't worry about paining yourself into a corner because "we're moving fast" - The thing hobbles along, the product gets some interest - It's incredibly hard to maintain, replace or otherwise improve - Original authors leave to other pastures because this isn't fun any more - Other folks come along and have to work miracles to try to undo the gordian knots that were made In other words: I like the idea of moving fast early on. Duct tape programming, love it. We also have to pay attention to the long term impacts of the decisions we're making. Some things are easy to fix/replace/undo, others are brutally hard. Say you write a prototype in {Ruby/Python/Perl/??}, now you have mass adoption and you rewrite a slow part of it in {sexy_modern_language}. That's great. Say instead that you decided to store all of your data in some bizarre format, hosted on IPFS, accessed via bittorrent, through an onion network, via ZModem, with CORBA - and you bake this in to such a degree that it's intermingled everywhere. Now you have a dilema: - you have a business, making money - you have increasing interest - you have a system that's effectively impossible to change or reason about - you can't really improve things to match the customer interest - you're wedded to the design because things are so interwoven - your only option is essentially a ground-up redesign and rewrite Now - if the product is simple enough, rewrite away! (think early Twitter), but if it's not? Good luck to you. I've seen this pattern more times than I haven't, and I think it deserves more nuanced thought and care when it comes to the economics at play.