Interesting story.<p>Earlier today I was reflecting my own background. About 10yrs ago, I bootstrapped a project into a startup. Some of its highlights would be getting paid customers, iterating product (pivoting in 2002 lol) and getting seed investment from institutional VC. You ask what's the big deal? Well, I was a junior in mechanical engineering with 0 coding experience in India, or any experience for that matter. I manage to move things forward. Got people involved.<p>10yrs later with multiple degrees in CS and 6-7yrs of experience delivering successful software at work. I struggle getting basic ideas off the ground. I just go into technical details and complexity.<p>Shouldn't this be other way around?
Inspirational - truly, and I mean literally, for me - that they started that with two guys who <i>were not experienced coders</i>.<p>There really is no excuse. I should get off my ass and make something.
<i>> [Instagram] also utilizes a storage technology called Cassandra that Facebook invented, open-sourced, and then abandoned.</i><p>Why was Cassandra completely abandoned at Facebook? It has a complex consistency model, sure, but what database technology have they built to use instead?
"A year ago, it moved to a continuous system which has it rolling out new code to its servers 50 times a year."<p>Surely they mean 50 times a week, or a day? Deploying once a week isn't noteworthy.
hats off to instagram, good people, development/product building focus seems on point. However, still seems like a lot of it is based on being first in there and getting the huge huge huge community/userbase engaged. Hitting it off with the users and then after critical mass/facebook getting involved, keeping users engaged, developing the product carefully, and letting the community naturally propel up and up... seems like that's what's kept them going