If you’re an engineer who reads Hacker News, Developer Twitter, or any other similar information sources out there, you’ve almost certainly come across a thousand articles with titles like the “Speed of Rust vs C”, “What Makes Node.js Faster Than Java?”, or “Why You Should Use Golang and How to Get Started.” These articles generally make the case that there’s this one specific language that’s the obvious choice for scalability or speed—and that the only thing for you to do is embrace it.
While I was in college and my first year or two as an engineer, I would read these articles and immediately spin up a pet project to learn the new language or framework du jour. After all, it was guaranteed to work “at global scale” and “faster than anything you’ve ever seen,” and who can resist that? Eventually I figured out that I didn’t actually need either of these very specific things for most of my projects. And as my career progressed, I came to realize that no language or framework choice would actually give me these things for free.
Instead, I discovered that it’s architecture that is actually the biggest lever when you’re looking to scale systems, not languages or frameworks.
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