Build smart from the start for maintainable, scalable services
I remember reading Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid. These are like RPGs in book form. Yes, we still had actual RPGs (Zork ftw!) but I couldn’t exactly take the Apple ][e on car trips, so books.
I only had a few of the titles, so after going through them often enough to end up at the same endings a few times, I start would page through the books to find endings I hadn’t reached through the intended manner of picking one of two or more decision options and turning to the corresponding page. In other words, I would try to backwards-engineer all the possible endings in the books. One book, though, had an ending that was simply unreachable. None of the decision pages had an option that led to that page. I did not know if that unattainable ending came about by accident or as an intentional private joke, but the whole thing felt unresolved to me. I don’t even remember which book it was or the storyline. I just remember I couldn’t reach that ending.
Let’s try this. You just founded a new company with a SaaS-based business model. Now you have to build the actual SaaS out from scratch. Where do you start?
- Define your minimal viable product, then let your three seed engineers write their pieces in whichever language they want, even if they each pick a different language
- Pick your platform and infrastructure components, like your database before defining your data model, then start writing code in JavaScript
- Start writing code for an API spec you sketched on a cocktail napkin in the newest hipster language
Running In Production With Scissors 
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