17 Comments
Aug 28, 2023Liked by Neo Kim

Hi,

You write "The communication paths between engineers increase exponentially as the team grows in size.", but in fact the total number of communication paths between n nodes is equal to n * (n-1) / 2, which is not an exponential growth, but an polynomial growth (quadratic to be exact), i.e. O(n^2).

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author

thanks for the great feedback. I will update the post.

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Nothing escapes the Math Police 🙌🏿

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Excellent explanation.

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Great read, Neo! In short don’t reinvent the wheel and avoid complexity as long as possible.

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I bet Jan Koum is glad he got rejected by Facebook in 2008! Thanks for the article.

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May 19·edited May 19

yeah the moral of the story is life gifts are not obvious because they are wrapped in rejection letters.

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I learned so much reading this. Also thank you for the bibliography/works cited.

While diagonal Scaling is an interesting infrastructure scaling, the use of load testing and the small team size were eye-opening

This allows me to delve deeper into some of mentioned concepts

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author

thanks for the feedback

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Great post! As someone who is building his own product, articles like these are a treat.

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Dec 17, 2023·edited Dec 17, 2023Liked by Neo Kim

Hi,

Thanks for the wonderful newsletter.

You have given a good overview on the type of technology stack used, it would have been much more helpful if you could have included about databases, and messaging queue being used.

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author

thanks for the feedback.

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I appreciate it. Your points that you've touched on in this post are crucial: communication paths, small team size etc. The great article and references.

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A great article, which does not explain why they were able to support 50 billion messages.

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Thanks a lot! Super interesting.

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Thanks for explaining it with clarity while being concise.

A quick question, what software are you using for your diagrams? I like their sketch feel.

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author

it's excalidraw.

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