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Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#281

Post by therealdrag0 »

I started working at a company 6 months ago, and in that time I've fixed a half dozen performance problems.

Some of them didn't matter THAT much, but some of them did. My team manages an authentication -service. Some of the calls were averaging hundreds of ms which added terrible overhead to other services' calls. In other places had CICD builds running tests twice, logs logging twice, inefficient algorithms, single HTTP transactions making dozens of DB calls. You name it.

Some of these were simple things that if you stopped to smell the roses you could notice and fix.

Let's all be boy scouts and make code better while we're in it :)

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#282

Post by abritinthebay »

luord wrote: post #215
abritinthebay wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in my experience the exact opposite is true. That's why it's called an anecdote; not data.

Exactly, I never understand the static vs dynamic flamewars. Most of the issues usually presented stem from poor developers or poor development processes/environments/tools. Poor code written in JavaScript won't become pretty just by translating to Java, and vice versa. That I've seen anyway.

As someone smarter than me put it: "Bad code is language agnostic"

Yes, catching type errors eliminates one category of error but, generally, the type of programmers that make that kind of error frequently will not constrain themselves to just one category of error.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#284

Post by timewarrior »

ccmonnett wrote: post #275
technosamay20 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built this product as a side project within another startup I was working in. We had lot of money, had been around for 3 years and did not have a product. Because of this I had multiple levels of bosses above me in the company. They all got really interested in starting to manage me and the product once we hit 5M users. They had a different vision, attachment and passion about the product. Around 2008, we were spen…

Thanks for sharing your experience. People are getting caught up in Ruby v Java v whatever and not seeing the forest for the trees - you have a valuable perspective and an effective way of communicating it. Appreciate it! May I ask you about your first 'biggest learning': how do you eschew cofounder responsibilities in an early company? Someone who genuinely cares and/or is really interested in the core business (pre…

Just saw this comment. Not sure if you will see the response. You raise a really good point.

If someone is joining a startup at an early stage, work like it is your own baby. You are spending your most valuable currency by being here - which is your time!

With time, hopefully, you will get rewarded for your effort and results. You will likely not get a founder level say and stake but your role should gradually expand. In the end founders take almost the same risk as the first employee, but get a lot more equity because founder was there at the start. Join a startup as an early employee only if you are able to accept this fact - otherwise you are setting yourself up for a lot of resentment and pain.

This above advise applied to me too for the first two years of my employment, before I started working on the ultimate successful product. We were building an offline search engine and as a part of that I build distributed file systems, crawled a billion pages and I was appropriately rewarded with career growth.

However with the new social product that I built, the situation was dramatically different. For that product I was there from day 0. I was owning the whole engineering (sole engineer at start and head engineering till I left) and significant portion of product. Till we got 5M users, I had a co-founder level say (but not the stake of course) and I worked with a co-founder level of involvement and dedication till that time. However once we got 5M users, multiple levels above me started doing meetings and taking critical decisions without involving me. I still had a co-founder level passion and it hurt to see the product flounder and being unable to do anything about it.

So I was in a uniquely bad situation and it is not common to be in this situation. However if someone really is and there is no way to get a founder level control - move out as soon as you can. And this is what I did - albeit 2 years too late.

Re: Does it scale? Who cares (2011)

#285

Post by mrbtie »

technosamay20 wrote: post #15

Couldn't agree with this article more. I built the biggest social network to come out of India from 2006-2009. It was like Twitter but over text messaging. At it's peak it had 50M+ users and sent 1B+ text messages in a day. When I started, the app was on a single machine. I didn't know a lot about databases and scaling. Didn't even know what database indexes are and what are their benefits. Just built the basic produ…

> I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale.

You must not be looking around at all, right?

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