Behind The Screens

A few years back, I was brought in to “speed up” a luxury apparel site doing over $20M in annual sales. The CTO thought it was just a CDN tweak or two. Their dev team thought it was “probably a caching thing.” Turned out, the real bottleneck was something nobody had looked at in years: a hidden image-processing job buried deep in a vendor’s API that ran every time a product page loaded. On paper, everything about their setup looked “by the book.” It passed Lighthouse audits. The docs for each tool said they were using it correctly. But the system as a whole had quietly developed inefficiencies that only years of

When most dev teams say they’re “building for scale,” what they actually mean is they’ve added a load balancer and are using a cloud provider that promises to “grow with them.” It’s comforting. It feels like future-proofing. But here’s the hard truth: most teams aren’t building for scale at all.They’re building for the illusion of scale – and that illusion tends to crumble the moment things get big enough to matter. I’ve seen this happen over and over again, even in teams with incredibly smart engineers. And I think I’ve figured out why. The moment it clicked A few years ago, I was consulting for a startup that had just crossed 100k daily active

I was recently working with a household-name brand – the kind that makes most people nod in admiration just from hearing it. When I met them, their team seemed stacked. They talked the talk. Credentials? No one with less than 5 years experience. Headcount? Very suitable for the project I was brought on to help with.. But spend just one week behind the scenes, and it became painfully clear: No one cared to learn anything new. I mean nothing. Not even out of curiosity. It wasn’t laziness. It was something more insidious: they were simply clocking in. Good enough was good enough. They hit their KPIs, collected their paychecks, and tuned out.