We've been killing conversations about software with "That won't scale" for so long we've forgotten that scaling problems aren't inherently fatal.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190213201804/http://shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html
We've been killing conversations about software with "That won't scale" for so long we've forgotten that scaling problems aren't inherently fatal. 7 comments
@neauoire A really interesting read, thanks. Part of me feels it’s a useful skill to be able to take a situated solution and generalize it for the wider “web” audience. This is because historically you couldn’t make a living designing software for 100 people. But now I’m imagining someone designing community software as a hobby, or even being employed as the community software designer. Definitely an interesting paradigm to consider. If you focus on how you’ll handle a million customers so hard you miss getting your first thousand users… |
@neauoire thank you. Not only “not inherently fatal”, but sometimes prioritizing scalability is actively damaging
Sometimes small is the point.
Sometimes scale fundamentally changes the problem, so planning for scale ought to be planning to replace.
Often, “designing for scale” is a premature optimization.