Have you ever created (or at least started to) a portal, an AJAX-enabled web application or a high-traffic website? If you have, you know that the biggest issues are the speed, the debugging process and the scalability.

For those that didn’t dig into high-traffic or big web applications until now, let me tell you: when it comes to complex (or big) web applications, it can be extremely difficult to create, maintain, debug or scale them without proper tools or architecture.

My biggest challenge while the Chief Architect at Brainient was finding a technology / framework that would enable us to create fast, reliable and scalable web applications. We tried most of the web technologies, frameworks, CMS out there and after almost one year we decided to stick with just a few:

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Just a few days before I left on my Christmas vacation to Italy, I got together with one of my best friends in college. He’s now working for Microsoft, so I was really keen to have an “inside look” of the little Redmond company .

What I found out? Well, not much, ’cause of the non-disclosure agreement he signed, but enough to be able to draw some conclusions:

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April 1st, 1976: 3 young guys start a new company to sell a “different” computer, Apple I. It was originally set to sell at around $667 after a price hike from $650 so Apple could make some sort of profit.

10 years later… Apple came up with the first personal computer that actually had a GUI (graphical user interface, that is…)

30 years have passed and Apple is the most loved brand in the consumer electronics world. Steve Jobs has been successful in making Apple a Lovemark. But how? Well… if you study Apple’s history, it’s not that hard to understand. Here it goes:

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Leonardo da Vinci believed that, to gain knowledge about the form of a problem, you begin by learning how to restructure it in many different ways. He felt that the first way he looked at a problem was too biased. Often, the problem itself is reconstructed and becomes a new one (nope, I don’t read much. not anymore… anyway).

So how does looking at things (or problems) in different ways help you create a better product? Well, for starters it can show you that it isn’t needed (happened to me a gazzilion times). It can make you discover new and useful features you could add or better yet, it could give you a starting point.

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If you own a photo camera, most likely you have an account on Flickr. If your mobile phone has a photo camera attached then probably you use Shozu to upload pictures directly to your account. If you have your own blog, you’ve probably already shared your albums there.

So what made Flickr so successful? Let’s see… first of all, it’s simple! Simple to register, to create albums, to share, to find pictures, and so on.

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