< Agenda

You Are Not Netflix

15:30 (30 minutes) · Hall 1B · Talk · Intermediate · Engineering

Somewhere right now, an app with 12 monthly active users has a dedicated K8s cluster. Somewhere else, a "temporary" script is celebrating its 4th birthday in production. This talk will teach you how to avoid both fates. You'll leave knowing when to keep things simple, when complexity is genuinely justified, and how to spot the warning signs of over-engineering and under-engineering before shipping. Our LLM besties have dramatically reduced the time it takes to write code, making design the new bottleneck in software delivery. The most expensive mistakes now happen before anyone opens an IDE. It has never been easier to build the wrong thing at warp speed, whether that's a multi-region failover setup for an app with 12 users or a hacky fix that miraculously becomes the backbone of the entire company. Netflix's architecture is brilliant. It solves Netflix's problems. Most of us have very different problems, and copying their homework won't help. This is a practical framework for designing at the scale you actually operate. We'll dig into why over-engineering and under-engineering are two sides of the same mistake, and walk through questions that tell you whether the simplest design will still be standing in two years. Expect real stories and lessons learned from getting these decisions right, and a few from getting them very wrong. What will I take away? - A cheat sheet for validating that a simple architecture can be extended later, without adding speculative complexity - How to figure out whether a design decision is easy to reverse later, or a one-way door that deserves the whiteboard inquisition - Team habits for making better architecture trade-offs