<story><title>Looking Back on Selling Gravatar to Automattic</title><url>http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-selling-gravatar-to-automattic.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MicahWedemeyer</author><text>The next time someone bitches to me about scaling, I&apos;m going to point them to this article.  It&apos;s a perfect example of why designing to scale from the beginning is usually bullshit.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s only worth scaling once you know you have something worth it.  Why design all sorts of crazy cache schemes, redundant load balancers, and master-slave databases when your actual product is crap?  All you end up doing is slowing yourself down.  Get some validation first that anyone is going to swallow your idea.&lt;p&gt;Sure, he had some late nights and some angry emails, but that&apos;s because he was dealing with the growing pains of being a success.  Better that than the loneliness and depression of working endlessly and never getting anything out the door.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mojombo</author><text>I&apos;ve found that it&apos;s best to find some sort of sweet spot. Not so simple that later scaling requires a huge rewrite, but not so complex that you&apos;re spending valuable time up front to scale something that may never need it. I now try to code the first version as a simple version of the later version. Think ahead, but build for the present.</text></comment>
<story><title>Looking Back on Selling Gravatar to Automattic</title><url>http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-selling-gravatar-to-automattic.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MicahWedemeyer</author><text>The next time someone bitches to me about scaling, I&apos;m going to point them to this article.  It&apos;s a perfect example of why designing to scale from the beginning is usually bullshit.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s only worth scaling once you know you have something worth it.  Why design all sorts of crazy cache schemes, redundant load balancers, and master-slave databases when your actual product is crap?  All you end up doing is slowing yourself down.  Get some validation first that anyone is going to swallow your idea.&lt;p&gt;Sure, he had some late nights and some angry emails, but that&apos;s because he was dealing with the growing pains of being a success.  Better that than the loneliness and depression of working endlessly and never getting anything out the door.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>richcollins</author><text>They aren&apos;t mutually exclusive.  A good, simple design will allow you to move faster and scale better.</text></comment>