Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I look at the last two, it was 6 month and 9 month. The first one was initially thought to be just another search engine for some of the company's content. Then it got transformed into the main data store including CMS and all those nicetees. In the end, 7 people worked on it. The second one was a tool used only internally by my customer's employees. They then sold the idea to some of their customers and it had to…
How are those big projects? Why would you need any scalability for that? From what you just said they're running for, at most, a few thousand people. In terms of loads/numbers/etc. that's child's play and definitely not "huge applications". The kind of decisions he's talking about are for things with thousands of concurrent users per second, not per day. That kind of stuff could be dealt with a single desktop compute…
With huge applications, I mean 10s of thousands of lines of code with features added on a daily basis by multiple developers.
What both have in common is that they started us as seemingly small 'throwaway tools' but grew into business scale applications that serve now a core purpose.
Btw, who said I didn't use MySQL and PHP ? :D