Five Years of Building Instagram

An overview of how Instagram has been engineered over the last five years. A few points stuck out to me.

Choose simple solutions and do not over engineer in order to future proof:

Our mantra, “Do the simple thing first” ... Since there were only two of us, we had to determine the fastest, simplest fix each time we faced a new challenge. If we had tried to future-proof everything we did, we might have been paralyzed by inaction. By determining the most important problems to solve, and choosing the simplest solution, we were able to support our exponential growth.

It takes an incredible amount of focus to do this, but

we often say “do fewer things better” inside Instagram

However, with that said, the author does state that this is not the answer all the time for everyone:

Doing the simple thing first doesn’t mean your solution will work forever. We’ve learned to be open to evolving our product...