when starting a web project you need to dream big! No I am not talking about hitting it big with the next facebook or YouTube and rolling in the snobby circles of Silicon Valley, but thinking big in regards to the back-end development of your site or web application. Being in the beginning stages of building a website myself, I am trying to guarantee that the the architecture of my site can handle scaling beyond even what I foresee as a successful amount of users. This is especially important for a newbie web developer like myself, because doing several key things wrong could be a costly mistake down the road if the site is a success.
While my personal knowledge on building to scale is limited, recently I have been focusing on the design of the database of my site, specifically in regards to database normalization, multiple databases versus numerous tables, and lean PHP code. I think that a common tendency I have, and most likely share with other newbies, is wanting to get something online ASAP and then ironing out the kinks later. While there is merit in this learning process, laying a solid back-end foundation is paramount. I love to learn by getting my hands dirty just as much as the next guy but the consequence of having a weak foundation could be that you miss a huge opportunity and more importantly you don’t get invited to that party in Silicon Valley.
for further reading; an interesting article about the importance of doing it right