Inside a Starbucks a business plots world domination Aspiring "Next Facebook Founder" Non-Programmer: "You need to write the code so that it can scale to at le

Inside a Starbucks a business plots world domination Aspiring "Next Facebook Founder" Non-Programmer: "You need to write the code so that it can scale to at least 3 million users in 6 months" Contract Programmer Hired Off Craigslist: "Pardon me?" ANFFNP: "If you look at the business plan, just after it defines your equity share in our little venture, you'll see that in week 20 we will have just over 1 million users. But by week 30 we will have 3 million users. After that, growth is exponential." CPHOC: "Umm, I think we can worry about that later. I'm using Rails and Twitter was built on it. Sure they had some problems at first, but they managed to clear them up." ANFFNP: "Well, I went to a startup pub night last week and this guy that wrote a URL shortener told me that Rails doesn't scale. I don't think we should use Rails." CPHOC: "Okay... I guess I can use ASP.NET or PHP." ANFFNP: "I heard at a FireFox 3.0 launch party last year not to use a Windows server because of security problems and that PHP powered Web 2.0. But our site's going to be Web 3.0, so PHP doesn't give us a competitive advantage." CPHOC: "Well I've always wanted to learn Erlang..." ANFFNP: "What's that?" CPHOC: "It's this language that a phone company made to run its infrastructure. It apparently scales really well and was benchmarked at handling over 20 million processes once." ANFFNP: "Excellent. I knew you were the right man for the job. I'll re-adjust our scalability numbers upward then. 20 million is about 6 times my original projections, so if I double them we should be good." CPHOC: sigh... Sorry, I'm in one of those moods today :-)