What is the most interesting thing you have learned in your reading of "Software Engineering at Google"?

My biggest takeaway was the description of the trade-offs between time and scale. I've spent most of my time building small internal tools and one off projects that collect a few dozen users at best. However, my most recent start up experience suffered large amounts of user traffic bringing our servers to their knees.

I learned very quickly that a single poorly optimized query can consume a server's resources with just a couple users pressing f5 repeatedly.

I still believe that most infrastructure is overkill for most applications. I believe that horizontally scaling servers early is a bandaid for poorly optimized code. However, the book made clear that the trade-offs between taking the time to optimized the code versus just spinning up a couple more $5 VPS to handle the traffic is not always clear.

I am going to think more about trade-offs when making technical decisions.