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How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

engineercodex.substack.com

11–20 of 202 posts

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

#11
post #2

14 million doing not so complex things is an easy achievement. When you get into a lot of microservices providing tons of features your teams will balloon.

That's why it's important to keep the number of devs low, it makes it less likely that one starts talking about microservices.

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

#13

"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 escape that no matter what you do.

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

#14
post #2

14 million doing not so complex things is an easy achievement. When you get into a lot of microservices providing tons of features your teams will balloon.

That's why it's important to keep the number of devs low, it makes it less likely that one starts talking about microservices.

It's more important to keep the number of features low. Good devs talk about aligning the architecture to requirements, and that sometimes includes microservices.

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

#15
post #2

14 million doing not so complex things is an easy achievement. When you get into a lot of microservices providing tons of features your teams will balloon.

That's why it's important to keep the number of devs low, it makes it less likely that one starts talking about microservices.

You talk as if monolithic apps are vastly superior. To be forward it depends entirely on the purpose and life of the application. It is about whatever shoe fits the design.

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

#16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why it's important to keep the number of devs low, it makes it less likely that one starts talking about microservices.

It's more important to keep the number of features low. Good devs talk about aligning the architecture to requirements, and that sometimes includes microservices.

This is true. I completely agree with the minimized scope. However a dev needs to be careful to not let their service just sit unmaintained. New teams will always need engineers to maintain and improve.

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

#17
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…

Instagram engineers themself wrote a bit about their backend infrastructure. One of the more important topics was how they shard the data [0] and this is also linked to in this blog post.

[0]: https://instagram-engineering.com/sharding-ids-at-instagram-...

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

#18
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…

They had a different person/team working on the front end and/or they don't remember?

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

#19

"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…

I have noticed absolutely no difference with Twitter/X. I am a casual user, sure, but for me it seems to work well.

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

#20

"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…

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes.

what happened?

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