Great, I'm glad to hear it's proving useful! I'll do a follow up with how well my NoDB implementation stood up to the pounding it's getting at the moment later in the week...
I actually LOL'd when I read that. Which is kind of embarrassing since it's really quiet in the office today :-)
Great post. I get analysis paralysis all the time when I think of new web apps. The idea that I won't have the perfectly scalable architecture (horizontally AND vertically) with all the cool infrastructure is enough to overwhelm.
That's because I also skip to the scenario of "What if my app gets real popular and then starts crashing all the time, and then everyone stops visiting while I try to learn how to set up nginx with memcached and ... ad nauseam."
Sometimes it gets me stuck and sometimes I remember to take baby steps like you wrote about.