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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

#21

Post by thilog »

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…

Twitter most likely hasn't been able to retain the "right" people.

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

#22

Post by Aeolun »

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…

Having only 3 people forces you to be very judicious about what you do. For most companies that’s a good thing.

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

#23

Post by EspressoGPT »

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…

> 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.

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

#24

Post by Aeolun »

Sparkyte wrote: post #15
Scarblac wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Sure. It’s just that 99% of applications work fine (or better) as a monolithic design.

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

#26

Post by Sparkyte »

rmetzler wrote: post #17
_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…

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-...

If it wasn't just an image site the potential for hotspotting would be insane!

Size isn't a bad thing anymore since price has dropped exponentially since the inception of Instagram.

I am positive they would use another modern technology today if it was present in the past.

Fantastic read though.

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

#27

Post by rmetzler »

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.

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

#28

Post by _xivi »

danparsonson wrote: post #18
_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…

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

[flagged]

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

#29

Post by Sparkyte »

thilog wrote: post #21
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…

Twitter most likely hasn't been able to retain the "right" people.

This is true.

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

#30

Post by lovich »

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.

Not engineer driven orgs _and_ their product people don’t know how to drive the product or set requirements, or engineer driven by the type of engineers who love to tinker without making any real progress business wise
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