> I've never understood this "don't obsess about performance at the start" rule.
It helps if you've seen, firsthand, a startup wasting time worrying about trying to optimize stuff they don't even know if they're going to need to optimize.
> my iPhone app starts up 5 seconds quicker
That's something you know you need right away, apparently. It's probably a sensible investment.
> Or as great as PostgreSQL is for single server deployment why wouldn't I look at something easier to manage, trivial to scale and a more agile schema like a DynamoDB, MongoHQ, Cassandra.
Because there are some big tradeoffs involved in using those. And because Postgres is not at all hard to manage or scale to a point where you can probably afford to look into other solutions or hire someone to scale it. This article is, after all, written by an Instagram guy, and they seemed to do ok with Postgres in terms of scaling.
That's not to say you shouldn't think about it at all, but there are so many unknowns that it often makes much more sense to spend time doing market experiments rather than technology experiments.
It helps if you've seen, firsthand, a startup wasting time worrying about trying to optimize stuff they don't even know if they're going to need to optimize.
> my iPhone app starts up 5 seconds quicker
That's something you know you need right away, apparently. It's probably a sensible investment.
> Or as great as PostgreSQL is for single server deployment why wouldn't I look at something easier to manage, trivial to scale and a more agile schema like a DynamoDB, MongoHQ, Cassandra.
Because there are some big tradeoffs involved in using those. And because Postgres is not at all hard to manage or scale to a point where you can probably afford to look into other solutions or hire someone to scale it. This article is, after all, written by an Instagram guy, and they seemed to do ok with Postgres in terms of scaling.
That's not to say you shouldn't think about it at all, but there are so many unknowns that it often makes much more sense to spend time doing market experiments rather than technology experiments.