{"kind":"doc","doc":{"title":"Scalability → Buildability","section":{"slug":"posts","name":"Posts"},"rkey":"1739212426700-scalability-buildability","cid":"bafkreiebsaiwms7obdxbfptalzvrufacrjqav2lv7dvymr5xku2v2cu3ke","renderKey":"bafkreiebsaiwms7obdxbfptalzvrufacrjqav2lv7dvymr5xku2v2cu3ke@2025-02-10T10:33:00Z@2026-08-25T00:37:52Z@Posts|","href":"/posts/1739212426700-scalability-buildability","publishedAt":"2025-02-10T10:33:00Z","updatedAt":"2026-08-25T00:37:52Z","tags":["development","scalability","composability","analytics","ai-workflows","growth-engineering","e-commerce"],"description":"A system scales internally when each feature leaves behind primitives that make the next one easier to build.","readingMinutes":2,"markdown":"# Scalability → Buildability\n\nTeams usually mean load when they talk about scalability: more users, more requests, more data without the system falling over. I keep coming back to another kind. A codebase scales internally when each feature leaves behind primitives that make the next one easier to build.\n\nAnalytics makes the difference visible. When tracking is added after a feature, it becomes a parallel implementation with its own requirements and failure modes. Engineers ship the feature and return to add events. Analysts specify those events and wait for another release. The same tax repeats every time.\n\nIf the tracking contract lives in the component, the work changes. A button can carry its event name, required properties, and expected behavior alongside its UI. Engineers inherit analytics when they use it. Analysts can inspect the component library to understand which data will exist. Product managers can include those expectations in the feature rather than in a second tracking document.\n\n## Composability\n\nWhen tracking is native, components carry behavior and observability alongside their UI. A `Subscribe` button can maintain one contract for the subscription action, the event, and the properties downstream analysis expects. The design system then enforces more than appearance; it preserves how the product explains itself to the data pipeline.\n\n## AI tooling\n\nThis structure also gives coding tools such as Cursor something coherent to extend. The model can see that a button includes behavior, tracking, and tests, then follow the same contract when it generates another component. The model isn't creating the composability. It's just showing whether the system already had enough structure to make the next feature cheaper than the last one.\n\n---\n","media":{},"series":{},"related":[{"title":"AndreiBot-3000","href":"/posts/1738693093717-andreibot-3000","section":"posts","description":"A GPT-2 system trained on approved Aspiration emails generated additional variants for the existing A/B testing program in 2020.","publishedAt":"2025-02-04T10:18:00Z"},{"title":"Case Study: Migrating Ice Barrel to Shopify","href":"/posts/1728582380556-case-study-ice-barrel","section":"posts","description":"Ice Barrel moved from WooCommerce to Shopify in under two months, lifting conversion 165% while handling a major product launch without checkout downtime.","publishedAt":"2024-10-10T09:00:00Z"},{"title":"Case Study: Building Tornado's Growth Engine","href":"/posts/1675271943000-case-study-tornado","section":"posts","description":"Growth engineering at Tornado: analytics, experimentation, and personalization systems behind major gains in customers, revenue, and engagement.","publishedAt":"2023-02-01T09:31:00Z"},{"title":"Farfield","href":"/posts/1779066375000-farfield","section":"posts","description":"Five small Go services, single binaries, content-addressed records, running on my homelab. The new backend for the site.","publishedAt":"2026-05-18T01:06:15Z"},{"title":"Create and Use Farcaster Signers","href":"/posts/1745543922514-create-and-use-farcaster-signers","section":"posts","publishedAt":"2025-04-24T18:18:00Z"},{"title":"Onchain Analytics","href":"/experiments/1791937789859-onchain-analytics","section":"experiments","description":"A homebrew analytics experiment: keccak256 session hashes and page-view counts recorded onchain on Base Sepolia.","publishedAt":"2024-04-05T15:01:44Z"}],"prev":{"title":"Who Really Wants Carbon Offsets?","href":"/posts/1738778326344-who-really-wants-carbon-offsets"},"next":{"title":"Pure Internet: no-html","href":"/posts/1740682611811-pure-internet-no-html"}}}