Most developers don’t overengineer because they’re stupid. They overengineer because they’re scared.
Scared of traffic spikes that never come.
Scared of being “wrong” in a code review.
Scared of the mythical future userbase their system must one day accommodate.
So they reach for Kafka before they reach for product–market fit.
They build microservices to support a team of… one.
They set up distributed tracing before their app has users — let alone performance problems.
And then they wonder why they’re burnt out, shipping slow, and quietly dreading the project they once loved.
You don’t have a scaling problem. You have a pretending-to-be-Google problem.
The Cult of Scale
VC-funded startups pretend they’re building the next Twitter.
Enterprise engineers pretend every app is mission-critical.
Solo devs mimic both — out of habit, not need.
But across the board, it’s the same sickness:
Optimizing for hypothetical success at the cost of actual progress.
You don’t need to shard your database to ship an MVP.
You need to know whether anyone cares.
You don’t need Kubernetes.
You need clarity.
What Real Scaling Looks Like
Real scaling problems are noisy, expensive, and boring.
They look like:
- Latency you can’t cache your way out of
- AWS bills that make your stomach drop
- Databases locking under pressure you didn’t expect
They don’t happen magically — they happen after you’ve won.
And they’re not solved by “future-proof” code.
They’re solved by:
- Observability
- Pragmatism
- And systems you understand deeply enough to rework
Build for the Problems You Do Have
You know what’s hard?
- Shipping consistently
- Keeping your project fun
- Understanding your stack well enough to move fast when it counts
You know what makes all of that harder? Invented complexity.
So build for the now:
- Use SQLite until it hurts
- Stick to a monolith until the seams scream
- Scale vertically first — and manually
- Add infra when it solves real pain, not imagined prestige
You Can’t Pre-Scale a Dead App
If nobody uses your app, it doesn’t matter how scalable it is.
If you never ship, you’ll never need to scale.
Build simple. Ship fast. Scale later — when it’s a real problem, not a costume.
TL;DR
- Most apps fail long before they scale
- Premature scaling is a distraction, not an achievement
- Complexity is a cost — only pay it when necessary
- If you’re not Google, stop building like you are
- Your job is to learn, ship, and adapt