architecture

Architecture scaling and lifecycle

• Validate ideas first with mocks and ads to gauge interest and gather data

• Refine idea with first few hardcore fans to iterate on

Exploration: Initial simple, lovable, complete product

• Use tools that are easy and familiar to validate early ideas

  • (But consider long-term consequences of not using simple ones)

• Examine data model for relationships

  • Traditional RDBMS if relational data, where referential integrity is important

    • PostgreSQL

      • Heroku integration

      • Free, open-source

      • Good optimizations

      • Battle-tested reliability, community, performance

  • NoSQL when horizontal scaling is paramount and eventual consistency is sufficient

  • Graph databases for graph-like data

• Mono-repo monolith

  • Minimal cognitive load for new, smaller codebase

• Established fully-featured framework (e.g., Luminus, Next.js, Ruby on Rails, Django, etc.)

  • Quick setup

  • Conventions over configuration

    • Minimal bikeshedding, analysis paralysis

  • Community of libraries/add-ons

  • 12factor principles

  • Server-side rendering

  • Integrated data binding

  • Migration generation

  • Documented schema

• Bulma CSS to Bootstrap basics

• PaaS infrastructure to minimize reliability issues and management (e.g., Heroku)

• Use other services to ramp up quickly

  • E.g., Auth0

• Test business value feedback loop as quick as possible

• Mobile-first, responsive web apps

Expansion: Proven founder-product-market fit

• More custom SQL instead of with ORMs

  • Database views for security

• Established testing frameworks (e.g., clojure.test, Jest, RSpec, Capybara, etc.)

  • Many Unit tests

  • A few system, end-to-end tests of core functionality

  • Test-driven development

    • Inexpensive adaptability

    • High test coverage

    • Simple tests

    • Model domain a simple as possible

    • Minimize premature optimization

• Break off a few major services that are fundamentally separate

  • Explore other technologies outside of The Citadel

    • Lower-level for performance

    • Larger community for hireability and tooling

    • Types for easing larger scale refactoring

    • Typescript/Golang?

• Auto-scaling via Cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, etc.)

• API Gateway

  • Single domain for API

  • Let outside developers interface with back-end

• GraphQL (optional)

  • Front-end declarative data fetching

  • Less knowledge of back-end API necessary

• CDN front-end

• Feature flagging for testing in production

• More, stronger testing

• A/B Testing with a lot of data to optimize key metrics

Extraction: Proven high, continual use

• Dedicated specialists

• Go to the metal or create your own metal if performance is needed

  • Rust

  • Apple Silicon

• Consider building own, custom infrastructure

  • For business-specific problems

• Native front-ends

  • iOS/Android

  • Vanilla JS, less libraries