This is less about scaling and more about any random technical knowledge you might need:
1) Companies with Serious Scalability Needs have a lot of organic knowledge in them, which you gain both a) by being mentored by senior team members and b) by baptism-by-fire.
2) Companies with Serious Scalability Needs have training budgets larger than YC's total amount invested to date. (Just a convenient ballpark figure for "Holy cow, that's real money!") They spend it to e.g. send engineers to conferences where people with organic knowledge of the subject will teach you best practices (i.e. Here's how we got burned, here's what resulted in less burnination). For example, ex-day-job dropped ~$20k to send myself and one other engineer to JavaOne, where we heard e.g. the chief architect from LinkedIn talk about what sort of caching strategy you need to have writes appear instantly consistent to the user who initiated them while achieving eventual consistence over many thousands of other users who they would fan-out to.
3) Largely as a result of the conferences in #2, there are presentations and, more rarely, videos online produced by people who do this sort of thing for a living. You found HighScalability.com , so that is good. I have learned a tremendous amount of not-covered-in-college-or-personal-experience technical data by consuming SlideShare presentations and following the output of people who routinely produce good stuff on particular topics. (For example, not exactly scaling, but the YSlow team created huge amounts of value for me by presenting on the how and why of web-page performance optimization several times.)
4) People who know this stuff are available to teach it to you, if you have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on it. If you don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend, you probably don't really have scalability problems.
5) Most startups have the scaling problem "We have no scaling problems!" For the rest, there's a lot of "Smart people plus challenges plus lots of headaches = we pushed our personal skill levels a step forward."
Comments
This is less about scaling and more about any random technical knowledge you might need:
1) Companies with Serious Scalability Needs have a lot of organic knowledge in them, which you gain both a) by being mentored by senior team members and b) by baptism-by-fire.
2) Companies with Serious Scalability Needs have training budgets larger than YC's total amount invested to date. (Just a convenient ballpark figure for "Holy cow, that's real money!") They spend it to e.g. send engineers to conferences where people with organic knowledge of the subject will teach you best practices (i.e. Here's how we got burned, here's what resulted in less burnination). For example, ex-day-job dropped ~$20k to send myself and one other engineer to JavaOne, where we heard e.g. the chief architect from LinkedIn talk about what sort of caching strategy you need to have writes appear instantly consistent to the user who initiated them while achieving eventual consistence over many thousands of other users who they would fan-out to.
3) Largely as a result of the conferences in #2, there are presentations and, more rarely, videos online produced by people who do this sort of thing for a living. You found HighScalability.com , so that is good. I have learned a tremendous amount of not-covered-in-college-or-personal-experience technical data by consuming SlideShare presentations and following the output of people who routinely produce good stuff on particular topics. (For example, not exactly scaling, but the YSlow team created huge amounts of value for me by presenting on the how and why of web-page performance optimization several times.)
4) People who know this stuff are available to teach it to you, if you have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on it. If you don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend, you probably don't really have scalability problems.
5) Most startups have the scaling problem "We have no scaling problems!" For the rest, there's a lot of "Smart people plus challenges plus lots of headaches = we pushed our personal skill levels a step forward."