This reminds me of a programming quote that I can’t seem to find, but the gist was “In programming a one in a million occurrence is going to occur all the time.” The idea being that because computers go so fast and repeat the same instructions over and over any failure condition even at a low probability will appear to happen often simply because of the scale.
For the big social media guys, they are rocking >1b users, and probably many times that in terms of active user accounts. Their databases contain just about every variant of every name and address on the planet. They have users from a timezone that’s +25 hours and the several that are +/-xh15m. Transactions from opposite sides of the globe are colliding and overlapping hundreds of times a second. They have seen every character set (including Klingon and Egyptian hieroglyphics). They see 1-in-1-trillion events all the time.
Their way of developing software is miles away, in fact totally different, from the traditional company app that has a few thousand users and managers that will enforce user workrounds for bugs and useability issues.
This reminds me of a programming quote that I can’t seem to find, but the gist was “In programming a one in a million occurrence is going to occur all the time.” The idea being that because computers go so fast and repeat the same instructions over and over any failure condition even at a low probability will appear to happen often simply because of the scale.
You are so right!
For the big social media guys, they are rocking >1b users, and probably many times that in terms of active user accounts. Their databases contain just about every variant of every name and address on the planet. They have users from a timezone that’s +25 hours and the several that are +/-xh15m. Transactions from opposite sides of the globe are colliding and overlapping hundreds of times a second. They have seen every character set (including Klingon and Egyptian hieroglyphics). They see 1-in-1-trillion events all the time.
Their way of developing software is miles away, in fact totally different, from the traditional company app that has a few thousand users and managers that will enforce user workrounds for bugs and useability issues.