Article · 15 min read

Scaling with common sense

Kailash Nadh · Zerodha Tech Blog Free Advanced India

The CTO of India's largest broker explains how a tiny team scales huge load by optimizing the application before touching infrastructure or rewriting. It is a strong reminder that hitting a limit usually means fixing the slow query, not rebuilding the system. A grounded Indian counterweight to the belief that scale requires a from-scratch rewrite.

  • Exhaust easy optimizations in the app before rebuilding
  • Most bottlenecks are the database, not the platform
  • Simple, boring, well understood setups scale further than you think
Open on zerodha.tech ↗

It answers 5 questions

  1. We ship fast but our codebase is turning into a mess. How much should a two-person startup care about tech debt?
  2. I built my MVP on no-code but my technical co-founder wants to rewrite it in real code. When is that migration actually worth it?
  3. Should we ship an ugly, half-working version now or wait until it feels good enough to be proud of?
  4. How should our shipping process change once we hire our first engineer and it is no longer just me pushing to production?
  5. How do I evaluate the code quality of a build I inherited from an agency?

Read with it

  1. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  2. This is the canonical framing for exactly your question: not all messy code is the same. Fowler splits debt on two axes,... martinfowler.com Essay · About a 5 minute read Technical Debt Quadrant Martin Fowler
  3. Video · ~13 min How to Plan an MVP Michael Seibel (YC)
  4. The origin text for the modern MVP and validated-learning vocabulary every founder now uses. Read it for the mental model that... theleanstartup.com Book · ~330 pages The Lean Startup Eric Ries
  5. Michael Seibel, who ran YC, makes the blunt case for shipping something almost embarrassingly simple and learning from real... Y Combinator Startup Library Video · ~10 min video How to Build an MVP Michael Seibel
  6. This is the canonical warning against throwing away working code and rebuilding from scratch, told through Netscape's rewrite... Joel on Software Essay · ~10 min read Things You Should Never Do, Part I Joel Spolsky
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