OnAMissionToGoToScale

What is #OnAMissionToGoToScale?

You may have already seen the #OnAMissionToGoToScale tagline on a bunch of my posts/pages on this website. Here is an explanation of what it means.

I created the tag line, #OnAMissionToGoToScale, as a way for me to summarize my technical goal as a Software Engineer. As a Software Engineer, my technical goal is to build software applications and systems that scale really well. Scaling here means different things to me such as:

• building systems that are tolerant to failure
• building systems that will not cripple in the face of unexpected surge of user requests/queries
• building applications that can be easily iterated upon (e.g. for A/B testing cases)
• building systems that have low latency
• building systems with high availability
• building systems with high reliability
• having great code documentation (for future reference, when the team gets bigger or just to remember what a section of the code does)
• choosing the right programming language based on the system requirements
• and so much more...

It is impossible for a system to be efficient in every single aspect that has to do with scaling, so my challenge to myself is to really understand the tradeoffs that need to be considered when building a fully scalable application/system.

There you have it, you now know what I mean by the tagline, #OnAMissionToGoToScale.