[michaelteter]

Yes but...

Still make some effort to build as if this were a professional endeavor; use that proof of concept code to test ideas, but rewrite following reasonable code quality and architecture practices so you don't go into production with lack of ability to make those important scaling changes (for if/when you get lucky and get a lot of attention).

If your code is tightly coupled, functions are 50+ lines long, objects are mutated everywhere (and in places you don't even realize), then making those important scaling changes will be difficult and slow. Then you might be tempted to say, "We should have built for 1 million users." Instead, you should be saying, "We should have put a little effort into the software architecture."

There are two languages that start with "P" which seem to often end up in production like this.

[sevensor]

Figure out your data structure definitions early, along with where those structures come from and where they’re going, and write disposable code around them that builds them and gets them where they need to be. Stable data definitions make it easy to replace bits and pieces of your application as you go. Especially if you view mutability not as the default, but as a performance optimization you can reach for if you need it. (You often do not)

[cultofmetatron]

> There are two languages that start with "P" which seem to often end up in production like this.

I think thats more due to their tendency to be grabbed by n00bs than any deficiencies in said languages.