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Discussion on: "Just make something" is not the best advice

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Austin S. Hemmelgarn

I’d strongly argue that that depends on how proactively you are designing your project. Just because you don’t expect to have millions of users doesn’t mean you shouldn’t design a system that can handle that many users.

Brings to mind one of my friends looking at me like I was crazy when I told him that I was rewriting the Discord bot I had just finished implementing in Python in Elixir. The Python code worked for my use case, but because of the limitations of Python and the bot framework itself quite simply could not be made reasonably scalable, so I chose to rebuild in a language that I could make more scalable than the Python code was with almost zero effort, and can easily make exponentially more scalable by putting in a bit more work. Yes, the scalability from this rewrite is overkill for my usage, but it’s also good practice for writing scalable systems.