> we have hundreds of engineers shipping hundreds of commits every day
Can someone with (any) experience explain to me why do seemingly perfectly functional websites need change all the time? Is the production version hacked together or what? Why can't websites be coded once and left to run with the rest of the effort being devoted to maintance/adding more servers as the load increases?
I admit that I know almost nothing about how large codebases function (it might being apparent judging by the question)
The changes are not only about making the website/app stable, it's mostly about shipping new features and product ideas.
The space where Instagram operates is very competitive, so they need to keep innovating and exploring new ideas to grow the product, increase usage, and improve retention...
I think a big part is just technical debt acquired through the years, when you are just starting you hack some version of the site that works because you need to grow fast, but that's not scalable, so a part of becoming a big company is to "refactor" or "re-architect" your app to either more modern designs or in some cases into a completely different app (On the inside)
Can someone with (any) experience explain to me why do seemingly perfectly functional websites need change all the time? Is the production version hacked together or what? Why can't websites be coded once and left to run with the rest of the effort being devoted to maintance/adding more servers as the load increases?
I admit that I know almost nothing about how large codebases function (it might being apparent judging by the question)