Do the Simple Thing First: The Engineering Behind Instagram

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&#x27;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&#x27;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>&gt; [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?

Still not sure why Hyperlapse exists ahead of an iPad tailored app.

Interesting, still at that scale: &quot;most of our backend logic lives in Django&quot;

&quot;A year ago, it moved to a continuous system which has it rolling out new code to its servers 50 times a year.&quot;<p>Surely they mean 50 times a week, or a day? Deploying once a week isn&#x27;t noteworthy.

hats off to instagram, good people, development&#x2F;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&#x2F;userbase engaged. Hitting it off with the users and then after critical mass&#x2F;facebook getting involved, keeping users engaged, developing the product carefully, and letting the community naturally propel up and up... seems like that&#x27;s what&#x27;s kept them going

$1 billion for Instagram.. that was cheap I think :)