Hacker News Reader

Comment by wldlyinaccurate | Hacker News Reader

I'm gonna be "that guy" and complain again that developers (web developers in particular) really need to learn the basics of scaling. There is no point having your app publicly available if you're not prepared for small spikes like this.

Edit: At the time of posting, the service was 503ing.

View on HN

Web developers are learning the basics of scaling. Hell, this guy is learning right now.

Scaling, like security or maintainability, is a really fluffy and cross cutting concept. It's hard to get it right without having a gradual increase in load. So talking about the "basics" is a bit unfair, I think.

In other words the developer should prematurely scale?

>I'm gonna be "that guy" and complain again that developers (web developers in particular) really need to learn the basics of scaling.

Why, would anything bad happen to the developer if his toy app breaks down under the pressure?

Because the reason he made it is probably that he wants it to be used. If it can't be used that is bad.

Is there a place to learn how to scale? Even just the basics or a getting started or something?

As someone else pointed out, learning to program is often done on your own, so where would someone go to learn this on their own outside of the hot seat?

I really like reading posts on High Scalability: http://highscalability.squarespace.com/start-here/

Is there a service that tests the scale of web apps? I'm not thinking of software, rather a service that web developers could use to test their app with simulated "real" traffic..

There is Loader.io from SendGrid (http://loader.io/) that lets you load test your web apps with thousands of concurrent connections.

Thanks..

I wonder if there's a marked for (helping to) optimizing sites and web-apps..

I've used https://www.blitz.io/ with some success

Learning to be a developer is still a hodge-podge, unstructured process, scaling is definitely not taught and often talked about in extremely abstract terms because a lot of authors have no clue themselves what is and isn't scalable.

A small VM can take huge amounts of traffic thrown at it. If you happen to be running basic PHP. But install wordpress and it's a whole other story.

Often until you've been hit by a spike like this you won't even know what is and isn't scalable.

That's because scaling is not in the domain of developers, as much as Heroku/AWS/etc. strive to blur the lines. It's in system administration and architecture.

It's a collaborative process between all three. There are a thousand different ways developers can prevent (and conversely, enable) scalability.

My point is that they are separate skills.

Only in the sense that making your software secure is a separate skill.

That's an extremely reductive argument.

Only the lucky ones need to scale :)

Well, this link is also on Reddit's front page now.

Perhaps their budget (both in terms of time and money) doesn't allow for it...? Don't default to the web developer incapable or disregarding scalability.

Needing to scale is a good problem to have.

I second that!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com