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An enthusiastic YES to this from @henrikjernevad:
mastodon.social/@henrikjerneva

I recognize every single one of those examples from the post’s intro. And I recognize the pattern: developers imitating tech giants on small projects where those giant-scale approaches make no sense at all.

I like Henrik’s question: does it scale •down•? Does it scale down to the size of our actual team, our actual project?

1/

MastodonHenrik Jernevad (@henrikjernevad@mastodon.social)Why are people so obsessed with scaling? And how come people never seem to worry about whether technology scales *down* to a low number? https://henko.net/blog/does-this-scale-down/ #programming #softwaredevelopment #softwarearchitecture

A lot of my own software work has been for very small companies: arts nonprofits, early startups, one-person bootstraps, community orgs that are and always will be small.

These orgs have problems that are very, very different from the problems that, say, Google has. There’s no sense in them inheriting the miserable tech tradeoffs a giant corp faces! Enjoy being small! Do it the simple way! Stay flexible!

2/

@inthehands Has your experience of development at modest scale given you a set of tools and recipes you like to turn to?

I've been paid either to do tiny tool stuff, or to contribute to the large and brittle systems at Web Scale, so the happy routes in the landscape in between are mostly unfamiliar.

@jmeowmeow Off the cuff:
- Web Scale can be small too. How much traffic do you get, really?
- They’re asking for an app, but probably want a responsive web site.
- If you really do need an app and the app is small, maintaining two native codebases for iOS + Android is easier than it sounds.
- HTML generated on the server >> fancy client JS for •many• projects.
- Or can it just be a static site?
- If you do need a DB, single-node Postgres works up to a surprisingly large scale.
- Simple + obvious

@inthehands I guess I am starting off okay then. I have a low complexity, non-social site aimed at creatively reskinning current public data of low cardinality, and the main difficulty has been finding a stable library for a core flow (which I believe I have in hand).

I shall choose simple and straightforward for the rest, drawing from examples when possible.

@jmeowmeow
Sounds like you’re probably doing just fine!

Jeff Miller (orange hatband)

@inthehands Appreciate the vote of confidence. Too busy a set of choices out there, but I have a couple of communities to bounce things off of which I should call on a little more often.

Really, a Node server looked like a good choice at the start, and I suppose I am getting portable knowledge, but mostly it's been a direct lesson in complex messy dependencies. When I'm tempted to write my own binary image compositor, I figure a wrong turn was taken somewhere.

@jmeowmeow
Without knowing anything at all about your problem, I’d definitely consider whether your site (or some parts of it) can be statically generated offline. Code that runs once per data update instead of once per request solves a whoooole lot of problems.

(And keep in mind that you can even statically generate an API sometimes! One project I still maintain has a read-only REST API that’s actually just a bunch of .json files served by a vanilla web server.)

@jmeowmeow
I don’t have a lot of love for Node/Express, though a lot of that is personal taste. If your problem is “list of endpoints, code that outputs JSON for each, serve large numbers of requests concurrently,” then yeah, it’s pretty good for that (though these days I’d be looking at what Swift, Rust, Go offer in that space). If you have complex data, or complex logic, or web site with assets, or or or…then you quickly find yourself reinventing a Rails-shaped app framework yet again.

@inthehands It's Node / Express, with Jimp as the "no-deps, doesn't need to scale" image library. Mostly intended for users to go through a style and location picker wizard, and bookmark an image source URL. It's an incomplete homage to a site I miss which went down and never came up.

github.com/jmeowmeow/PixieRepo if you're curious. It could launch any week now, or so I tell myself.

GitHubGitHub - jmeowmeow/PixieReport: Pictorial weather reports inspired by Tamsin Bowles' WeatherpixiePictorial weather reports inspired by Tamsin Bowles' Weatherpixie - jmeowmeow/PixieReport

@inthehands Most of the work on the "express-server" branch.