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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

#141

Post by agentgumshoe »

dingdong33 wrote: post #134
rhuru wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk's actions have certainly damaged Twitter and its engineering. When you set the house on fire of course some termites will get killed but then you might also kill some babies and the family dog. A lot of tech companies have bloat in the form of AI ethics people, DEI people and so on. They need to go. But Musk probably hurt twitter a lot in short term by firing a lot of engineers and making it a place that made pe…

Our company has a position like a DEI director, and honestly, it baffles me. All they seem to do is push what some might call 'leftist woke propaganda' in their never-ending meetings, and I question whether our company's resources should be invested in that.

It's just 'brand.' Companies don't generally give two stuffs about their staff, as you find out when anything like unions or HR complaints come up.

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

#142

Post by duckhelmet »

csomar wrote: post #64
rhuru wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk's actions have certainly damaged Twitter and its engineering. When you set the house on fire of course some termites will get killed but then you might also kill some babies and the family dog. A lot of tech companies have bloat in the form of AI ethics people, DEI people and so on. They need to go. But Musk probably hurt twitter a lot in short term by firing a lot of engineers and making it a place that made pe…

> AI ethics people These do actually have a proper job. They do ethics laundering for the tech companies and are very valuable.

[dead]

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

#143

Post by bregma »

ahoka wrote: post #109
Octabrain wrote: post #81

I find the simplicity of the stack brilliant. It makes me to think now, to which extent, the industry nowadays simply suffers from a mix of lack of knowledge, CV driving design and big players in the game trying to sell you overkilling solutions and approaches for their own economical benefit. Have we perhaps, fell into a big enchant and, at the end of the day, 99% of companies out there could just use a classic LAMP…

I just imagined trying to sell this architecture for a new product in an imaginary company, an amalgamation of every place I have ever worked: You have to change to Azure, because we are Microsoft partners and we have free credit. The credit is not too much though and we have to spend the same money on useless trainings so we keep being partners. 4 core and 8GB should be plenty for your dev VMs, that’s the largest we…

> What did I miss?

    Seven red lines, two with red ink, two with green ink and the rest – with transparent. One in the shape of a kitten.

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

#144

Post by rjzzleep »

_xivi wrote: post #7

> we can assume that Instagram was written using Objective-C and a combination of other things like UIKit. How can they know the internal infrastructure but have to assume the app language? Edit: So the entire piece is taken almost verbatim as-is from a couple old articles on instagram engineering blog. It might as well just redirect to: https://instagram-engineering.com/what-powers-instagram-hund... This is against…

> How can they know the internal infrastructure but have to assume the app language?

At that time that was the only solution that would have made sense given the achieved behaviour, performance AND development effort.

I did spend a lot of time Cordova(PhoneGap) and all the other HTML5 app thingies for iOS at the time.

Not sure why that particular in my opinion pretty obvious choice bothers you that much. That is very much the reason why they didn't even bother releasing it for Android until almost two years later.

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

#145

Post by wild_egg »

BoorishBears wrote: post #80
rmetzler wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The fun part is often all that bullshit hyper optimized complexity can still be beaten on all the web core vitals by a humble LAMP server

So not only are you wasting your time on all the wrong things, you're also gaining nearly no benefit from it

I'm pretty convinced that all these shiny new hotness tools and frameworks of the past decade are actually just meant to sabotage competition and small companies

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by codethief »

bregma wrote: post #143
ahoka wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just imagined trying to sell this architecture for a new product in an imaginary company, an amalgamation of every place I have ever worked: You have to change to Azure, because we are Microsoft partners and we have free credit. The credit is not too much though and we have to spend the same money on useless trainings so we keep being partners. 4 core and 8GB should be plenty for your dev VMs, that’s the largest we…

> What did I miss? Seven red lines, two with red ink, two with green ink and the rest – with transparent. One in the shape of a kitten.

That'd be easy but I believe you're looking for orthogonal lines! :)

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

#148

Post by Cyph0n »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #128
Octabrain wrote: post #81

I find the simplicity of the stack brilliant. It makes me to think now, to which extent, the industry nowadays simply suffers from a mix of lack of knowledge, CV driving design and big players in the game trying to sell you overkilling solutions and approaches for their own economical benefit. Have we perhaps, fell into a big enchant and, at the end of the day, 99% of companies out there could just use a classic LAMP…

I run a small startup. We use a monolith and docker and no kubernetes. The tech team is me and two young software engineers. I.e. I'm the only experienced person in the team. My engineers are super productive though and quick learners. The thing is that with a small team, you need to focus your engineering efforts on things that add values, i.e. mostly functional improvements of your product. Everything else is a dis…

> One nice thing in Google cloud is that you can create a vm and parametrize it with the docker container image and it will run it. No need to install anything.

Never knew about this feature!

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

#150

Post by jakjak123 »

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"

Well, it doesnt look like they were doing much of billing/payments which eats so much time. And 14M users on a sporadically used social network with a couple of curated photos per user is not that much. Its a great achievement nonetheless.
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