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How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

engineercodex.substack.com

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Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#71

Post by blackoil »

Sparkyte wrote: post #40
drno123 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what is the consequence, how has quality of Twitter diminished? As a “normal” user I can not observe any degradation of Twitter service.

Sure, but I feel like this was because of feature creep more than anything else. Most common thing people use it for is posting and reading. If you fake feeds as if they are real-time then the viewer will never know there was a system outage. I am almost positive there was a massive security breach too.

> I am almost positive there was a massive security breach too.

That's a very serious allegation, as it would be illegal to not report it. Can you add some details?

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#72

Post by thebears5454 »

EspressoGPT wrote: post #23
Sparkyte wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this idea hurts the industry. Don't get me wrong. I think it is important to hire the right people, but if you don't hire enough people this 3 man job is 80-100 hours a week per for months to years. Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. Then when you design more features, security and other various systems to serve the customers it will creep in complexity. You can not esca…

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. He had a point there though: He said that there seem to be "3 managers 'managing' one engineer", and I believe this is a common problem in the industry. VC-funded startups are terribly overstaffed and over-inflated.

There is not a single VC that is three managers to one engineer

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#73

Post by gumballindie »

Sparkyte wrote: post #13
kristopolous wrote: post #4

"When you choose the right people you'll need only a few. When you don't, you'll need them all"

I think this idea hurts the industry. Don't get me wrong. I think it is important to hire the right people, but if you don't hire enough people this 3 man job is 80-100 hours a week per for months to years. Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. Then when you design more features, security and other various systems to serve the customers it will creep in complexity. You can not esca…

> 3 man job is 80-100 hours a week per for months to years.

Is it though? Small, lean, teams have fewer processes, less distractions, better communication, and more flexibility in what they can do. I've been in such teams and built such scalable systems and there was nothing 80-100 hours about it. It turned worse once the company was acquired and management and "specilised" workers were brought in.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#74

Post by thebears5454 »

drno123 wrote: post #36
Sparkyte wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when he acquired twitter he fire 2/3rds the company.

No, what is the consequence, how has quality of Twitter diminished? As a “normal” user I can not observe any degradation of Twitter service.

Very famously he had Ron DeSantos on to announce his presidential campaign, but his website didn't work at all.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#75

Post by 0wis »

engineercodex wrote: post #68
0wis wrote: post #8

Interesting I wonder if its seems easy because it’s explained simply or if it really is simple to put in place. I want to make a clone now, just to try. At least for this inspiration, this article was well worth the read. Thanks !

Author here. Comments like this make my day, so thank you! I’m trying to find old software engineering gems and explain them as simply as possible, so I’m glad you found it simple to understand. Also, it’s definitely possible to make a clone, but the hard part is getting the users :)

Of course, I do not envision getting users. Only for fun and training - I think having examples of simple solutions to seemingly hard problems in mind makes it easier to come up with one in the future.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#76

Post by teakie »

engineercodex wrote: post #50
surfingdino wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like someone may have been using ChatGPT to produce that post.

Author here. No ChatGPT was used. Just my own brain reading through old talks and articles from Instagram engineering and Excalidraw for the diagrams. I did my best to put together all the info I learned from them into a comprehensive and simple manner.

[flagged]

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#77

Post by koonsolo »

rmetzler wrote: post #27
0wis wrote: post #8

Interesting I wonder if its seems easy because it’s explained simply or if it really is simple to put in place. I want to make a clone now, just to try. At least for this inspiration, this article was well worth the read. Thanks !

Instagram engineers found some remarkable simple solutions to some hard problems. It's not easy to come up with these solutions. Designing the IDs for example is no small feat, but since this is now common knowledge it's probably not too hard to build a similar system. To get traction from users is the real challenge.

> To get traction from users is the real challenge

Unfortunately yes. Scaling is a problem I would love to have :D.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#79

Post by onurcel »

rich_sasha wrote: post #25

Stories like this kind of make sense to me. 3 people is very few but I guess they really knew what they are doing. Meanwhile, all these orgs with essentially a CRUD app, with 1,000s of engineers..? That I never understood.

These CRUD apps need complex business rules, requiring expertise in the domain and making them configurable on the application level for customer while trying to keep the app not bloated.

Scaling is not the only challenge engineers face, but somehow it's the one that is mostly praised.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#80

Post by BoorishBears »

rmetzler wrote: post #27
0wis wrote: post #8

Interesting I wonder if its seems easy because it’s explained simply or if it really is simple to put in place. I want to make a clone now, just to try. At least for this inspiration, this article was well worth the read. Thanks !

Instagram engineers found some remarkable simple solutions to some hard problems. It's not easy to come up with these solutions. Designing the IDs for example is no small feat, but since this is now common knowledge it's probably not too hard to build a similar system. To get traction from users is the real challenge.

Which makes things like Vercel so depressing to me.

You've got a company paying off influential people in a space where people are looking for guidance, convincing them that they too have hard problems that cannot settle for simple solutions.

Selling the narrative that developers need to be all in on the most irrelevant aspects of building a product, and ignoring the fact that if you instead focus on building simple, easy to maintain software, the fact your LCP isn't hyper optimized by some newly invented mental model for app development won't matter: Google (or any search engine for that matter) will not ignore the fact people just actually want your content.

They do not care how great your web core vitals are if you waste a bunch of time bending over for some irrelevant bullshit problem instead of talking to users and iterating.

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