I encountered this quote while reading Martin Klepmann’s Designing Data-Intensive Application which got me thinking: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch > never works and cannot be made to work. John Gall, Systemantics (1975) This is a famous “law” in software engineering. (although the original context in which the author said this is in regards to general systems (mechanical systems like Titanic ship or human systems like an organization; come to think of it, even software systems are just an extension of such systems).

Geo-Routing (Case Study on Craigslist) When you open craigslist.org it does a couple of redirection before finally landing on the subdomain closest to your city. Having separate sub-domain and listings for those particular cities is partly how it seems to handle the distribution of the content. (making it more scalable) Give it a try: https://craigslist.org Here is the journey of the request: curl -I craigslist.org HTTP/1.1 301 Found Location: https://www.craigslist.org/ redirected to https://www.