I agree, but this is harder than it sounds. Why? If this is your first time building such a system you don't even know what is protocol and what's not.
There's an old saying that you need to build three apps on your framework. That first app shows that your framework works for something. The second app shows that its more general than just the first app. The third app shows that you weren't lucky.
Curious, how was Facebook designed? Are there any post-mortem docs on it? I know that MySpace seemed really ad hoc. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook was more ad hoc than we imagine it to have been
How do you measure "more ad hoc"? The only software that's not ad hoc are huge enterprise projects that fail most of the time.
If I had to guess I'd say that both MySpace and Facebook were completely ad hoc, but the difference was probably that Facebook kept their technical debt down so that they never accumulated an area of code that was too hairy to refactor or replace. MySpace on the other hand probably got complacent in their success and didn't worry too much as their architecture calcified into an unmaintainable mess. By the time they saw Facebook nipping at their heels their code base was past the point of no return, and the company culture made it impossible to hire the level of technical talent they would have needed to right the ship.
Of course I'm completely talking out my ass here, but that's the impression given by the respective product histories.
Who doesn’t imagine Facebook’s early design to be “ad hoc”? It was programmed as a spaghetti mess of PHP on Zuckerberg’s tiny laptop, and only worked because the user base was inherently limited to a few thousand people. Then the spaghetti mess was grown and added to over the next year or two, and the system scaled because each college’s network could be contained in a single server that only had to support a few thousand users (these servers used to use domain names like harvard.thefacebook.com or mit.thefacebook.com, IIRC). At some point they completely rewrote it with an architecture that would scale and not waste hardware, but it definitely didn’t start out that way.
There's an old saying that you need to build three apps on your framework. That first app shows that your framework works for something. The second app shows that its more general than just the first app. The third app shows that you weren't lucky.
Curious, how was Facebook designed? Are there any post-mortem docs on it? I know that MySpace seemed really ad hoc. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook was more ad hoc than we imagine it to have been