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development

You Aren't Google

March 28, 2010 20:54:03.683

I like this post, because it makes a point that a lot of web developers really need to understand: you aren't going to have massive scaling issues:

The sooner your company admits this, the sooner you can get down to some real work. Developing the app for Google-sized scale is a waste of your time, plus, there is no way you will get it right. Absolutely none. It's not that you're not smart enough, it's that you do not have the experience to know what problems you will see at scale.

He's making that point in the context of NoSQL databases (vsersus SQL), but it holds for a lot more. I'm reminded of an anecdote a friend related to me years ago when he just started a new job. He was being shown a web project with a 3 tier architecture, failover capabilities, expensive software all around. When he asked how many users of the system there were going to be, the answer was "3 or so now, maybe 10-20 later". When he suggested that they just use something like Access, they treated him like some kind of heretic, and hustled him along to a different project.

That's the kind of thinking that powers a lot of fake work in this industry...

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posted by James Robertson

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