Comment by cik

This nails my issue with systems design insanity. There are so many things you learn through living with systems that are correct, though counterintuitive.

Do a thing. Write rubbish code. Build broken systems. Now scale scale. Then learn how to deal with the pattern changing as domains specific patterns emerge.

I watched this at play with a friend's startup. He couldn't get response times within the time period needed for his third party integration. After some hacking, we opted to cripple his webserver. Turns out that you can slice out mass amounts of the http protocol (and in that time server overhead) and still meett all of your needs. Sure it needs a recompile - but it worked and scaled, far more then anything else they did. Their exit proved that point.