The video discusses the concept of "doing things that don't scale" in software startups. It emphasizes the importance of testing and iterating on a product before launching. The analogy of checking every pipe in a house for leaks is used to highlight the significance of thorough testing. The 90/10 solution, coined by Paul Buchheit, suggests achieving 90% of the benefit with only 10% of the work. Examples from Gmail, Facebook, Twitch, Friendster, MySpace, Imeem, and Google are provided to illustrate the challenges faced in scaling software and the hacks used to overcome them. The video concludes by emphasizing the importance of focusing on delivering value and solving problems as they arise, rather than trying to perfect a product before launch.
Do things that don't scale
- The most profound aspect of the topic "Do things that don't scale" is the importance of testing and iterating on a product before launching.
- Testing and iterating on a product before launching is crucial for success.
- The analogy of checking every pipe in a house for leaks is used to emphasize the importance of thorough testing.
- Software companies often use hacks to make their product work when they don't have time to build the right thing.
- Dalton Caldwell is highlighted as an expert in this area.
90/10 solution - Paul Buchheit
- The 90/10 solution, coined by Paul Buchheit, suggests achieving 90% of the benefit with only 10% of the work.
- Buchheit's credibility as the inventor of Gmail adds weight to his advice.
- Founders may dislike the idea, but it is worth considering.
Gmail
Gmail: Development and Early Challenges
- Paul Buchheit built Gmail by integrating his own email into a Google Groups UI
- Features were added based on Buchheit's needs and feedback from others
- Gmail experienced a major outage, highlighting the importance of reliable email
- Gmail was initially developed as a workaround for running Linux on the desktop
- Google had concerns about hardware limitations before releasing Gmail
- The invite system was a necessity due to limited server space, not a growth hack.
Facebook
The early days of Facebook were marked by the challenges of scaling software. The company started with cheap and janky servers, managing them physically at a data center. As they expanded to different colleges, Facebook used separate instances for PHP, MySQL, and memcache. They launched each school as a separate database to avoid scaling issues. It took years for them to build a global user's table and eliminate this workaround.
Twitch part 1
The challenges faced by live video platforms, using Twitch as an example, include scaling and maintaining stability due to large traffic peaks. To address this, Twitch implemented a hack on Justin.tv to turn any page into a static page, allowing for caching and temporary disabling of certain features. Later, a more complex solution was implemented to cache parts of the page and make other parts dynamic.
Key points:
- Live video sites experience larger traffic peaks compared to regular websites
- Scaling and maintaining stability is difficult for live video platforms
- Twitch used a hack on Justin.tv to turn pages into static pages for caching and temporary feature disabling
- A more complex solution was later implemented to cache parts of the page and make other parts dynamic.
Friendster vs MySpace
The challenges faced by Friendster and MySpace in scaling their software:
- Friendster used complex algorithms and hired engineers to calculate the size of a user's extended network, while MySpace simplified it by displaying whether someone was in a user's friends list or extended network.
- MySpace faced difficulties in serving live streams to a large number of viewers, but they solved it by having the website communicate the number of viewers to the video system, which pre-populated the stream to the necessary number of video servers.
- Friendster had a delay in propagating user streams to all video servers, resulting in a delay before the stream appeared for everyone. Despite being a "dirty" solution, it worked.
Imeem
The most profound aspect of the topic is the innovation of playing video in a browser without external dependencies, using YouTube as an example.
Key points:
- YouTube's use of Flash to play videos directly in the browser was a major product innovation.
- Imeem wanted to do something similar for music and used open source video tools.
- Imeem hacked the video code so that every music file played on their platform was actually a video file with no video content, just audio.
- This decision was made quickly and under pressure, but it worked effectively.
Twitch part 2
Twitch implemented two hacks to overcome scalability challenges: establishing free peering relationships with ISPs worldwide and using a community-based translation strategy. They saved money on streaming live video by partnering with ISPs and borrowed the idea from Reddit to create a website where volunteers could translate their site into multiple languages. Despite concerns about translation quality, they believed imperfect translations were better than none. Eventually, they obtained free translations for their entire product.
Google
Google's scalability issues with their original algorithm led to the development of MapReduce, a method to parallelize and break down the crawling and re-indexing process. This story highlights the concept of doing things that don't scale and building a monolithic product before dealing with scalability issues.
- Google faced scalability issues with their original algorithm
- They had to run a batch process to re-index the web
- The process started failing, resulting in stale search results for months
- This led to the development of MapReduce
- MapReduce is a method to parallelize and break down the crawling and re-indexing process
- Google only addressed the issue after their search engine became stale
- This story highlights the concept of doing things that don't scale and building a monolithic product before dealing with scalability issues.
Startup advice
The most profound aspect of the text is the concept of "things that don't scale" in software startups.
- Testing and iterating on a product is more important than trying to perfect it before launch.
- The analogy of checking pipes in a house is used to explain the importance of fixing leaks as they occur.
- Successful companies earn the privilege to work on scalable projects by first creating something people want.
- Examples of Apple and Google are given to illustrate how non-scalable efforts paved the way for later scalable innovations.
- Focusing on delivering value and solving problems as they arise applies in both the real world and the software world.