Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

- Sellers (Amazon, third party, retail store) - Inventory (forecasting, recommendation) - Customers (comments, ratings, returns, preferences) - Warehouses (5+ distinct types, filled with custom machines) - Transit Options (long haul, air, vans, cars, bikes, walking, boats) - Delivery Partners (DSP, Flex, Fedex, UPS - forecasting capacity here) - Routing (between warehouses, within warehouses, to specific homes) - skipping AWS - skipping billing - skipping advertising on amazon.com (bidding, attribution, etc)

There's optimizations and metrics collected and packages transition between all these layers. There's hundreds of "neat projects" running to special case different things; all them useful but adding complexity.

For example ordering prescriptions off Amazon pharmacy needs effectively its own website and permissions and integrations. Probably distinct sorting machines with supporting databases for them. Do you need to log repairs on those machines? Probably another table schema.

You want to normalize international addresses? And fine tune based on delivery status and logs and customer complaints and map data? Believe it not like 20 more tables. Oh this country has no clear addresses? Need to send experienced drivers to areas they already know. Need to track that in more tables.

> In the first emergency meeting of the National Security Council on the day of the attacks, Rumsfeld asked, "Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just al-Qaeda?" with his deputy Paul Wolfowitz adding that Iraq was a "brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily—it was doable," and, according to John Kampfner, "from that moment on, he and Wolfowitz used every available opportunity to press the case."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld#Military_decis...

1. Efficiency, which I define as minimising losses i.e not writing things inefficiently, avoiding artificial complexity, bloat and keeping code simple. Performance hits here can also be a 1000 cuts problem when depending on many 3rd party pieces while having people chanting "premature optimisation" at you.

2. Optimization, which I define as employing specialist algorithms (which sometimes come in the form of entire tech stacks these days) with the cost of added complexity (and potentially performance trade) to get performance beyond the basic or naive yet efficiently implemented methods. The cost benefit ratio to these is not always worth it, especially in the beginning.

Hopefully the point I'm trying to make should be obvious, that attempting #2 before #1 is a bad idea, and in less explicit words I suspect this is kind of what the author is getting at... Yet it's not all that uncommon to see someone trying to fit a turbocharger to a cheese skateboard with 64 triangular wheels.

YAGNI? But you could say that about a lot of things and this also gives you other options like releasing to a subset of customers (rolling release system like LTS etc.)

I work somewhere that has done this but for other driving reasons but it is a scalability dream. It is the web equivalent of desktop software running in Citrix! I haven’t seen anyone tune SQL in 4 years there whereas it has been a regular pastime everywhere else!

Yes you can’t do this for social networks but you can do it for most “customer with isolated clients” type shops which is most companies.