Scale Forem

About Scale Forem

Welcome to Scale

Welcome to Scale, the professional community for engineers, architects, and technical leaders who build and operate systems that handle massive load. If you've ever faced a problem that couldn't be solved by a quick search or a "Getting Started" guide, you're in the right place.

Our Mission: Stuff You Can't Google

Our guiding principle is simple: we focus on "Stuff You Can't Google." This is a space dedicated to the nuanced, experience-driven insights that only come from years of working on complex, high-scale systems. We move beyond the basics to share the hard-won lessons, practical trade-offs, and deep technical knowledge that defines senior-level engineering.

Our goal is to create a high-signal environment where practitioners can learn from each other's successes and failures.

What We Discuss

We encourage deep, substantive discussions and articles. If you have real-world experience to share, this is the place to do it. Topics we love to see include:

Architecture & Design

  • Deep dives into distributed systems patterns (e.g., consensus, sharding, replication).
  • Practical trade-offs in event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pulsar, etc.).
  • The realities of scaling microservices, databases (SQL/NoSQL), and caching layers.
  • Advanced API design decisions (REST vs. gRPC, versioning, idempotency).

Infrastructure & Cloud-Native

  • Advanced Kubernetes topics: multi-cluster management, service mesh implementation (Istio, Linkerd), and building custom operators.
  • Sophisticated Infrastructure as Code patterns (Terraform/Pulumi) for managing large, complex environments.
  • Production-grade GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Flux) and secrets management at scale.
  • Cloud architecture discussions focused on resilience, multi-region strategy, and security, not introductory service guides.

SRE & Observability

  • Practical implementation stories for SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets.
  • Scaling observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus with Thanos/Cortex, Loki, OpenTelemetry).
  • Case studies on effective, blameless postmortems and chaos engineering experiments.

Performance & FinOps

  • In-depth analysis of p99 latency issues and high-throughput performance tuning.
  • Effective load testing strategies for distributed systems.
  • Actionable cloud cost optimization tactics and FinOps culture.

Culture & Career

  • Navigating the Staff, Principal, and Distinguished engineer roles.
  • Deconstructing complex system design interview problems.
  • Building effective platform engineering teams to improve Developer Experience (DevEx).

Keeping the Conversation Focused

To maintain the quality and focus of this community, moderators will close or reject content that is out of scope. Please avoid posting:

  • Beginner-level guides: Tutorials like "How to install Docker" or "Intro to Python" are better suited for other communities. We assume a foundational level of knowledge.
  • Simple questions: If your question can be answered by the first page of official documentation, it doesn't belong here.
  • Unsubstantiated opinions: Tool-bashing or strong claims must be backed by deep technical rationale and experience.
  • Product marketing: Content that lacks technical depth and serves primarily as a marketing piece will be removed.

How You Can Participate

  • Share Your Scars: Write about a real-world problem you solved, the trade-offs you made, and what you learned. These stories are the lifeblood of our community.
  • Ask Deep Questions: Go beyond "how" and ask "why" or "what if?" Frame your questions with context from your own challenges.
  • Engage Thoughtfully: Add your perspective to existing discussions. If you disagree, explain why with technical reasoning. The best answers often come from a healthy debate.

We're excited to learn with you. Welcome to Scale.