[bovermyer]

You know what hasn't been done? A blog post about how to make a service that fulfills the needs of most people most of the time.

All of the online and print material about such things focus on how to achieve massive scale correctly. Don't get me wrong; this is valuable and, generally, sound advice.

However, it also ignores the majority of use cases for software.

I would love to see a blog post here from someone who has solved a very specific problem for a very small audience, and gotten a very enthusiastic response. That would be meaningful on a larger scale for me.

[0xFACEFEED]

This is because the people solving real world problems aren't writing books/tutorials/guides.

Real world system design is dirty. Mostly this is due to constraints (time, cost, etc). And no one starts with zero architecture and 10 million users.

Guides like this serve no purpose other than to fatten vocabularies and promote the "brand" of people who aren't actually doing the work (speakers, educators, etc).

[bovermyer]

I didn't say I was looking for a guide. I'm looking for a story.

Surfacing things like this elevates the entire practice, since it illuminates what that "dirty" work looks like.

[econochoice]

> Guides like this serve no purpose other than to fatten vocabularies and promote the "brand" of people who aren't actually doing the work (speakers, educators, etc).

Yep. They're often ghostwritten, too.