[tsmango]

I’ve been writing a series of “Design Principles” based on lessons learned from building and running software systems. The latest one is about scaling.

The core idea: most apps don’t need things like Kafka or CockroachDB on day one. You can push run-of-the-mill stacks like Postgres or SQS much further than you think, and that’s how you actually learn what scaling feels like. Specialty tools are impressive and have their place, but you only benefit from them once you’ve truly outgrown the simpler paths.