New Application? Just Write The Damn Thing
I have been getting a thought into my head the last couple of days. I have been talking a lot about things surrounding web application building the last weeks. Primarily it has been about all the things that are common to most of the application ideas that I have. While reading about Scaling Twitter though, I got to thinking. I might be worrying a bit too much about things that are not even important before there are a lot of active users actually using the product on a daily basis.
Maybe it is because it is easier to talk about all the things you ought to do right, instead of just writing the damn thing. It is also a lot safer for the ego in some way. You can postpone putting your idea out there - because no mather how good an idea it is, someone is bound to be of another oppinion. I will try to not let myself be blinded by all the negative what if's.
For us, it’s really about scaling horizontally - to that end, Rails and Ruby haven’t been stumbling blocks, compared to any other language or framework. The performance boosts associated with a “faster” language would give us a 10-20% improvement, but thanks to architectural changes that Ruby and Rails happily accommodated, Twitter is 10000% faster than it was in January.
In the near future I will be creating technical proofs of concept (because the design part is not my strong side) of several of my ideas. This way it will be easier to assemble a team, and decide what to actually do.
This way, I will also have something real to write about.