| Bias alert: I have commit to Rails. I think another bit that you've missed here is that once you have the users and are looking at scale, you've learned a lot about what you actually need. This fits well with all of the Lean Startup stuff: startups are an experiment. In other words, before you're actually at scale, how do you know what your requirements are? Better to build things in something that lets you discover these requirements as quickly as possible, then fix an inconsistencies in what you've built, rather than try to imagine what your future requirements may be, build that, and turn out to be wrong. To use one of the more famous examples of a pivot, if the Flickr team had spent a ton of time analyzing their anticipated needs for a game engine, that would have all been wasted when they pivoted to photo sharing. On the smaller scale, if you asked me today why rendering GitHub's views is slow, I probably would have guessed that it's their SOA-style architecture, an overhead between components. I then could have wasted tons of time optimizing that, with little impact on what actually mattered. But you can't take these measurements until you have a system that actually exists in the material world. |