Christy:
Was that something also you were trying to coin?
Dan:
Technical debt is something else that I’ve forgotten.
Christy:
I mean to bring it back to the debt your project can go have you ever read about Instagram and their expansion?
Dan:
No.
Christy:
Its quite funny and very like serendipitous I suppose. They got bought up by Facebook well no it was prior to that, it was before they got bought by Facebook and they suddenly like they boomed and they got massive and it was like a proper load of crap and they were using like an AWS server based and stuff like that. It hit this certain point where they’re like wait we don’t really like… We’re totally winging this. We kind of need to sort the database out, but we don’t know what to do and then just as that happened, Amazon released a bigger like more powerful database server and they were like hey bought that one and upgraded. Amazon has like the number two times. They’ve hit this point of like they’re totally saturated and they’re like ‘What are we going to do? We don’t know what we’re doing.’ Then Amazon would be like here have a more powerful database.
Dan:
You never see any attempt to plan for scaling. I just always think for always because you never know people talk about scaling as if scaling is like a one thing. You’ve got a scale, but how if you’ve got a scale what is the bottleneck in your software and you don’t know that at the beginning. Is it going to be that you’re going to have too many users. Is it going to be that there’s going to be one user doing this particular action which is causing a lot of problems with the database. Is it going to be you hit the limit of one of your technologies and you just don’t know. Its almost like.
Christy:
Well, what I’ll bring it back to what I said at the beginning that if it kind of hits that point where the technology isn’t suited any more, you’ve probably made it. The scaling there is to rebuild. Rebuild with some money, because potentially you built the initial one with not a lot of money. Congratulations.
Dan:
Absolutely. Another element that’s important about choices in technology which I find quite ironic is not the community around and how that community behaves. The irony is as were talking before most of the articles about which program runs best are completely unbalanced people shouting at each other and then that person goes well why doesn’t everyone want to use my programming language. The programming language I love. Its like well, how are you going to teach people that, you know?
If you want someone to learn it, you’ve got to make it easy to pick up and for them to feel like this is a good choice the people that are teaching you this are nice. I get a good feeling because most of the time you’re making bets on the future. When someone says to us give us your opinion on what technology I should choose. Essentially, you’ve got a caveat with, but I have no idea. You know what I mean? I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, so half the time you’re saying you’re just using your experience to look at say a programming language and what you’re looking for is what is the community like? If I Google for a common problem, is someone solving it or is someone going.
Christy:
Are people nice in IRC? Yeah, we still use IRC.
Dan:
Exactly. What’s that? I mean you had that. Well, we want to talk about that.
Christy:
I’ve had a lot of back and forth with lots of developers of various kind of technologies and stuff like that. Recently, well not even recently, I tend to kind of instead of going on stack over phones and things like that or IRC. I’ve been just hunting down the main developer’s e-mails and stuff and I just e-mailed him directly. Whenever I have like an issue, or a question, or even just to be like yo, this technology is dope and pretty much my Twitter account I never use it apart from to Tweet at. A bit of technology. Just be like thanks for that. That was super useful.
When the people that are developing it are nice and the people around it in the community and everyone is really helpful of course you’re going to kind of feel warm towards that.
Dan:
That will out weigh the perceived oh this isn’t the fastest. This sort of is scaling badly or something. Its a massive part of it like you said to feel good about it and the people around that community.
Christy:
Yeah.
Dan:
I suppose that’s just like anything. You’ll go to a local coffee shop where you like the people. You want to go to one that’s maybe got better coffee, but you find pretentious. You know?
Christy:
I definitely go with the nicer coffee.
Dan:
Yeah, that’s because you’re a programmer.