Comment by alpine01

There's a now famous Harvard lecture video on YouTube of Zuckerberg earlier in the Facebook days, where he walks through the issues they hit early on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFFs9UgOAlE

I watched it ages ago, but I seem to remember one thing that I liked was that each time they changed the architecture, it was to solve a problem they had, or were beginning to have. They seemed to be staying away from pre-optimization and instead took the approach of tackling problems as they had as they appeared, rather than imagining problems long before/if they occurred.

It's a bit like the "perfect is the enemy of done" concept - you could spend 2-3x the time making it much more scalable, but that might have an opportunity cost which weakens you somewhere else or makes it harder/more expensive to maintain and support.

Take it with a pinch of salt, but I thought it seemed like quite a good level-headed approach to choosing how to spend time/money early on, when there's a lot of financial/time constraints.