Pixietown

👏 more 👏 developers 👏 need 👏 to 👏 hear 👏 this

I can count on one hand the number of my clients over the past couple of years who haven't either over-architected for scale or were unnecessarily concerned about it (prior to coming to me for strategic advice, of course 😉).

You don't need to understand Distributional Little's Law to figure this out, it's obvious with primary school level math.

(screenshot excerpt from https://tailscale.com/blog/new-internet)

@ryantownsend I think their answer to "how did we get here" is missing a crucial bit of nuance: the influence of tech company blogs.

I've noticed a pretty clear pattern over the years where some tech company has to solve a problem at scale, blogs about how they've done it, and then there's a horde of developers who excitedly reads that blogpost and declares it the new best practice, elevating it to the level of "you are not a serious developer if you don't do this", often egged on by the tech company in question.

When prodded as to why, given that they are not a big tech company themselves, the answer has always been the same: a *belief*, not merely a hope, that they will be soon. Many of them outright reasoning along the lines of "if I do the same thing as this big tech company, I *will* grow as big as them and get rich, because clearly it worked for them".

This is, IMO, a much stronger effect than that article implies; this kind of technical writing actually drives entire hype cycles and steers entire developer communities in specific directions (as opposed to individual developers just being a bit optimistic), and I've seen it happen first-hand many times.

@joepie91 @ryantownsend on the other hand I've talked with an admin who very much prefers to deploy to kubernetes rather than bare metal, because k8s makes deploying and managing things and keeping services running much easier and more uniform. Yes, even if it's a single python script running on a single low powered machine.