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.