Scaling Your Foot
There was recently a link on proggit that caught my attention: I’m Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass, by Ted Dziuba. In his post, he complains about too much talk about scalability in popular news sources for software developers these days.
The core of his argumentation is the fact that most developers most likely develop applications that are not going to be used by millions. And he is right, of course. Perhaps there is too much focus on scalability and parallel processing - not that many developers need it to build the next website for their clients.
But it’s interesting. Instead of discussing which templating language is best, discussions about scalability trigger the engineer’s heart, and tickles the brain. Did we start in this industry to be mindless consulting drones?
Let’s continue discussing it, and perhaps - just perhaps - sometime in the future when we’re all working on Internet scale applications, we’ll know what to do.
Mindless consulting drones? I’d attribute this recent fad to nothing more than curiosity and “cool”. I’ve been looking at stuff like Erlang for distribution and (shortly) at Haskell for functional stuff, not because I think I need it for the next big thing, but at least it’s pretty interesting.
It’s like a new level in the game of programming, where the monsters are different and you kill them with new weapons. It’s just more fun than rummaging around in the same levels where you’ve spent the last couple of years.