Things I Learned this Week

Among the things I learned this week:
* Bluefield, WV‘s historic homes. (Courtesy: Mercer County Convention and Visitors Bureau/Bluefield Historical Society)

* Plumber unions fought to keep waterless urinals illegal. (Courtesy: Gizmodo)

* The founder of Chipotle attended CIA. (Courtesy: NYT)

Scaling’s Downside

Usually we think of scaling in a positive way (growth, doing more better bigger), but there are downsides:

This game was particularly hard to play for us, since Blogger was hosted software (I mean, in the cloud), unlike most of the tools we were competing against. The operational and engineering challenge was that we had to build features that scaled to all our users. And when we wanted to change something, all the users had to accept that change.

Read more at Ev Williams’ Medium post.