Scalability Memes

The bell curve of architecture wisdom strikes again! On the left, we have the blissfully ignorant junior dev who's happy with a monolith because they don't know any better. In the middle, the insufferable mid-level architect screaming about microservices like they've discovered fire. And on the right, the battle-scarred senior who's been through enough distributed system nightmares to circle back to "just use a damn monolith." Nothing like spending six months untangling a hairball of 47 microservices communicating through a message queue that nobody understands anymore just to realize it could've been three functions in one repo.

The eternal gap between theoretical architecture and actual production traffic! 😂 When someone asks if your system can handle a million concurrent users, but your current load is just TEN people, what do you do? Tell the truth and look incompetent or confidently lie and pray you'll never have to prove it? This is basically every startup pitch deck vs. actual server metrics. "Oh yeah, our architecture is totally cloud-native, horizontally scalable to infinity!" Meanwhile, the poor Node.js server is running on a t2.micro instance that crashes when three people use the search function simultaneously. The best part? When the miracle happens and you actually get that traffic spike, you'll be frantically Googling "how to optimize database queries at 3am" while telling management "it's just a minor scaling issue!"