Let's face it, your startup hustler sometimes might be an asshole. They want you to move fast, ship features, and of course make the product scale.
There's one time when i built a startup with my co-founder, we were moving fast. First week we got 50 users, second week 120 users, fifth week 1000 users (it's fine), seventh week 1200 users (still fine), and then the eighth week we got 5000 users.
Database queries sweats, server slowdowns, the app start to lag, and users are NOT happy with it.
And then we realized
Dude, have you implemented working cache mechanism?
That was the moment we realized that we didn't have a peroper mechanism our caching layer. We were so focused on shipping features that we overlooked the importance of having a well-defined interface for our caching system.
But thank god. We had an interface for our data access layer. Because of that, we started working to implement how can we cache data without changing the rest of the application.
Interfaces are the unsung heroes of software development. They provide a contract that defines how different parts of a system interact with each other. By defining clear interfaces, developers can work on different components independently, making it easier to scale and maintain applications.
In our case, having a well-defined interface for our data access layer allowed us to implement a caching mechanism without changing the rest of the application. This not only improved performance but also made it easier to maintain and scale our application as we grew.
Don't forget to define clear interfaces in your applications boys, abstraction is the key to scalability and maintainability.