I've was mostly a web guy, riding the internet from '94 until about '06 when I started to get into more serious stuff...up until that point it was C, Perl, Java etc , but it was mostly pushing business data around, which is what I think 90% of all commercial programming is these days (so don't knock it...it pays the bills).
In '06 I joined a startup and we needed to scale. I hadn't had experience with this stuff and neither did most people on my team...so here is what we did.
* Try new things, but basically find out what most people are doing that have already gone down this path (stand on shoulders of giants, as someone mentioned)
* Read, read, more reading...talking to other devs...network...DO NOT REINVENT SOMETHING (I also call this the Kiss of Death). Unless you are Google, Amazon or Facebook, use off the shelf if you can.
* Use technologies that will work for your problem. We chose Erlang for ours b/c it of what we were doing. Something like Java would have worked, but would have made the job 10x harder. C would have been ideal, but we would have to reinvent nearly all of Erlang, so just choose Erlang.
* LEARN about things like good architecture design, SOA and failure (when a system goes down, what happens...).
*Invest in a good test suite or test infrastructure, but realize that it will be nearly impossible to test at scale.
During that time I felt like I was constantly reading every paper I could find, blog on scaling and back-end systems and talking to every dev or had ever done it. It was work, but not the type normally associated w/ dev....but was 100% worth it.
In '06 I joined a startup and we needed to scale. I hadn't had experience with this stuff and neither did most people on my team...so here is what we did.
* Try new things, but basically find out what most people are doing that have already gone down this path (stand on shoulders of giants, as someone mentioned)
* Read, read, more reading...talking to other devs...network...DO NOT REINVENT SOMETHING (I also call this the Kiss of Death). Unless you are Google, Amazon or Facebook, use off the shelf if you can.
* Use technologies that will work for your problem. We chose Erlang for ours b/c it of what we were doing. Something like Java would have worked, but would have made the job 10x harder. C would have been ideal, but we would have to reinvent nearly all of Erlang, so just choose Erlang.
* LEARN about things like good architecture design, SOA and failure (when a system goes down, what happens...).
*Invest in a good test suite or test infrastructure, but realize that it will be nearly impossible to test at scale.
During that time I felt like I was constantly reading every paper I could find, blog on scaling and back-end systems and talking to every dev or had ever done it. It was work, but not the type normally associated w/ dev....but was 100% worth it.