Re: PHP vs a rendered index.html … your story brings back fond memories of my college days (around 2001–2002).

I was a full-time student but also worked for the university’s “internet group.” We ran a homegrown PHP CMS (this was before WordPress/Movable Type), and PHP still felt pretty new. Perl was everywhere, but I was pushing PHP because I’d heard Yahoo had started using it.

Around then, the university launched its first online class registration system. Before that it was all phone/IVR. I warned our team lead the web server would melt down on registration day because every student would be hammering refresh at 9am to get the best class times and professors. He brushed it off, so I pre-rendered the login page as a static index.html and dropped it in the web root.

He noticed, got mad (he had built the CMS and was convinced it could handle the load), and deleted my pre-rendered index.html. So young and dumb me wrote a cron job that pinged the site every few minutes, and if it looked down, it copied my static index.html back into the web directory. Since Apache would serve index.html ahead of PHP, it became an instant fallback page.

Sure enough, at 9am the entire university website went down. Obviously orders of magnitude less scale than your FB story (and way less exciting of an event), but for my small university it was brief moment panic. But my little cron job kicked in and at least kept the front door standing.

While I’m not in active day to day development anymore, I do still work in tech and think a lot about ways to avoid computation. And something I’ve learned a lot from reading your posts over the years and my own personal experiences is just how big you can scale when you can architect in a way that “just pushes bits” (eg “index.html”) as opposed to computes/transforms/renders something … and I’m not sure you can ever really learn that expect through real world experience.

Regarding your links, I’ve seen you post about 1 before and have read about it - it looks very cool. I don’t recall seeing 2 or 3 before and look forward to reading more about those. Thanks as always for your insights!