Join 📚 Josh Beckman's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Josh's read, .
Good architecture is built incrementally, but **not** designed incrementally. The [active-active, sharded architecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8NWDHgWA28) that powers Shopify today was drawn on a whiteboard in 2014 (not designed incrementally), and it took ~6 years to fully materialize, with a major customer-facing milestone every year (built incrementally). We would’ve hit a local maxima if we had not intentionally spelled this out.
The Napkin Math Methodology for System Design
sirupsen.com
The IRS [says](https://www.irs.gov/publications/p535): "To be deductible, a business expense must be both ordinary and necessary. An ordinary expense is one that is common and accepted in your industry. A necessary expense is one that is helpful and appropriate for your trade or business."
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Bits about Money
It's fairly common for programmers to expect that hardware will solve all their problems, and then, when that doesn't happen, pass the issue onto the user, explaining why the programmer need't do anything to help the user. A question one might ask is how much performance improvement programmers have given us. There are cases of algorithmic improvements that result in massive speedups but, as we noted above, Discourse, the fastest growing forum software today, seems to have given us an approximately `1000000x` slowdown in performance.
How Web Bloat Impacts Users With Slow Connections
danluu.com
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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