Other Things We Want to Optimize for

For example, a feasibility concern for the chat app may be memory availability on the device that the chat app runs on.

A conversation can have an arbitrarily large number of messages. If we load all the messages into memory without pagination when the app first mounts, we will quickly run out of memory and the app will crash.

Practicality

Choosing to pursue a more technically complex and robust solution at a higher engineering cost is not always appropriate for a business that needs to be agile to test hypotheses and iterate quickly.

A social media platform like OkCupid operates in a very competitive landscape so there’s an urgency to launch quickly and iterate on experimental features in response to new market insights. A flexible architectural design that is easier and faster to implement but has more technical debt is often the right choice for OkCupid. Continue reading →