Does it scale? Who cares (2011)
I care.<p>It&#x27;s easy to brush off scaling concerns as not important, but I&#x27;ve had personal experience where it&#x27;s mattered, and if you want a high profile example, look at twitter.<p>Yes, premature optimization is a bad thing, and so is over engineering; but that&#x27;s easy to say <i>if</i> you have the experience to make the right initial choices that mean you have a meaningful path forward <i>to scale</i> when you do need it.<p>For example, lets say you build a typical business app and push something out quickly that doesn&#x27;t say, log when it fails, or provide an auto-update mechanism, or have any remote access. Now you have it deployed at 50 locations and its &#x27;not working&#x27; for some reason. Not only do you physically have to go out to see whats wrong, you have to organize a reinstall at 50 locations. Bad right? yes. It&#x27;s very bad. (&lt;---- Personal experience)<p>Or, you do a similar ruby or python app when your domain is something that involves bulk processing massive loads of data. It works fine and you have a great &#x27;platform&#x27; until you have 3 users, and then it starts to slow down for everyone; and it turns out, you need a dedicated server for each customer because doing your business logic in a slow language works when you only need to do 10 items a second, not 10000. Bad right? yes. Very. Bad. (&lt;---- Personal experience)<p>It&#x27;s not premature optimization to not pick stupid technology choices for your domain, or ship prototypes.<p>...but sometimes you don&#x27;t have someone on the team with the experience to realize that, and the push from management is to just get it out, and not worry about the details; but trust me, if you have someone who is sticking their neck out and go, hey wait, this isn&#x27;t going to scale...<p>Maybe you should listen to what they have to say, not quote platitudes.<p>Ecommerce is probably one of those things where the domain is well enough known you <i>can</i> get away with it; heck, just throw away all your rubbish and use an off-the-shelf solution if you hit a problem; but I&#x27;m going to suggest that the majority of people aren&#x27;t building that sort of platform, because its largely a solved problem.