Things That Don't Scale, The Software Edition – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel

Coined the term '90/10 solution' and invented Gmail. He built features iteratively by addressing his own needs and fixing issues as they arose, a prime example of doing things that don't scale.

An email service developed by Google, which Paul Buchheit created by first putting his own emails into an existing Google Groups UI and building features iteratively based on his needs.

The technology company where Paul Buchheit developed Gmail and where early search technology faced scaling issues leading to the creation of MapReduce.

An operating system Paul Buchheit preferred to run on his desktop, influencing his decision not to use Outlook on Windows.

The social media giant whose early scaling method involved creating separate PHP instances and MySQL servers for each university, a 'copy-paste' approach to manage growth.

A server-side scripting language used by Facebook in its early days, where a separate instance was run for each university to manage scaling.

A database management system used by Facebook in its early stages, with separate instances created for each university to handle scaling challenges.

A live streaming platform that employed various 'things that don't scale' hacks, such as using static pages to handle traffic spikes and implementing free peering relationships.

The precursor to Twitch, which used a button to turn dynamic pages into static ones to handle massive traffic surges from live streams.

An early social networking site that struggled with scalability issues, particularly with a feature that calculated the user's extended network, leading to performance problems.

A multimedia software platform used by YouTube and IMeans to play video and audio content directly within a web browser without external applications.

An open-source framework that was created based on the MapReduce programming model, used widely by large internet companies.

A social networking site that offered a simplified solution for displaying connections ('so-and-so is in your extended network') as a contrast to Friendster's complex, resource-intensive approach.

A music service that cleverly used open-source video technology by treating music files as video files with zero bits in the video field, effectively creating a video site with no video to play music.

A social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website, from which Twitch borrowed the idea of a community-driven translation system.

The video-sharing platform that innovated by playing video directly in the browser using Flash, a technique adopted by IMeans for its music service. Also, a former employer of a network ops guy hired by Twitch for peering expertise.

The original algorithm developed by Google for its search engine, based on a paper, which was effective but faced scaling challenges as the internet grew.

A programming model developed by Google to process large data sets in parallel, created out of necessity when their original indexing process failed due to the web's rapid growth.

A company whose founders took photos of rental properties themselves in the early days, illustrating the 'things that don't scale' principle in the real world.

A technology company whose early, non-scalable methods (like Wozniak's hand-soldering) enabled its later success and the development of scalable products like AirPods.

A food delivery service whose founders reportedly did deliveries themselves, serving as another real-world example of tackling initial scaling challenges.

Co-founder of Apple, known for hand-soldering the original Apple computers, representing an early, non-scalable approach that earned the company the ability to create modern products like AirPods.