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by jbardnz 3622 days ago
First I would say Pokemon Go has done incredibly well to handle such massive growth so quickly, no doubt they were able to leverage a lot from Ingress but I could imagine many other companies having days of downtime while trying to scale up so quickly.

I also tend to disagree a bit with the article. For every situation like this were early scalability is important their are a 1000 MVP apps that are prematurely optimized or over engineered. At the end of the day the chance of anyone building an app that will get over 100,000+ in a week (and keep those users coming back) is very very very slim.
4 comments
nathan_f77 3622 days ago
Still, I think it makes sense to adopt a language and framework that makes this kind of scalability very easy. Nothing can really be called "over engineered" if it only took 5 days to create. Not even prematurely optimized. I think he just built something correctly and didn't take dangerous shortcuts.
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drinchev 3622 days ago
100% agree with you. As a freelancer I usually have to decide technology stack and infrastructure and I always go with the cheapest option for my client with the argument that one day he could just scale it up even by rewriting it.

This makes 3 months project delivered in 1 month and in the end the client usually benefits that.

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huskyr 3622 days ago
> I always go with the cheapest option for my client

> with the argument that one day he could just scale

> it up even by rewriting it.

Which in practice of course never happens. Instead, the old code gets patched up until everything fails completely, and only then a rewrite happens :)

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kevan 3622 days ago
Which is a perfectly valid choice in many cases. I plan to drive my car for as long as possible and into the ground before I get another one. As long as I know the eventual replacement cost is coming and budget for it it can be a good choice.
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fizzbatter 3622 days ago
I definitely agree with you in the normal case, but not with PoGo for what it's worth.

Pokemon Go is a bit of a singularity in growth. It's apparent to everyone on the street that (atleast, for the moment) this thing is huge.

When something is so obviously on fire with growth, over engineering might not be so bad. Look at any of the popular PoGo apps.. they have all dealt with big numbers.. the landscape is just a bit insane right now for that game.

I like making side projects, and i definitely agree with you not to over engineer.. but i feel like this is one case where it may not be the end of the world. With PoGo, if you don't balance the two (over engineering vs mvp) you'll likely end up sad, either way.

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webtechgal 3622 days ago
Yes, driving a nail with a sledgehammer is usually not a very good idea. :-)
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