Franco Gilio

A short story about deferring tech choices to thought leaders: Early days at Disqus (~2010-2012), we made several frontend choices based largely on what thought leaders were promoting at the time. One example: there was a big movement toward "micro-frameworks." Instead of larger, well-tested libraries like jQuery, you'd stitch together tiny interoperable micro libraries (Ender.js was one). Disqus was an embeddable JavaScript app, so file size mattered. It fit our use case, so we went with it. Then it went live, and we were serving millions of users. The reality of those choices became clear. Micro libraries meant that instead of one good semi-bloated library, you ran 6-7 smaller, less-tested, crappier ones. We burned a ton of cycles fixing bugs and covering corner cases when we could've been shipping product. We made a few choices like this. At conferences, I'd track down those same thought leaders and ask for advice. "I'm hitting problem X, Y, Z. How did you solve this?" That's when I learned my lesson: they rarely had answers, because they'd never reached our scale. Their energy went into promoting new stuff, not running it. You should know this has never stopped. It's happening right now with AI. It'll happen again with whatever comes next. Do your own homework. Test a lot. Don't just go with what somebody tells you.

Wall Street, 1999