Technical debt is your friend until it isn't

And I try to remind the engineers, we would be so lucky to have tech debt because that means people are using the product.

RabbitMQ is a message broker software, and "coworkers" here refers to a background job processing system, not human colleagues.

But what we didn't need at launch was a distributed scheduler with coworkers and RabbitMQ. We just didn't need it because we had no users.

I actually think as a startup your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company.

Simon is Notion's CTO who advocated against premature optimization, leading Notion to run on a single PostgreSQL database instance that nearly caused the company to shut down.

For the longest time, Simon's really good at don't do premature optimization, so for the longest time, we Notion runs on one instance of Postgres database... So there's a doomsday clock that when we're going to truly run out of this space to store everything in Notion and Notion got a complete shutdown.

You have a technical debt runway. Once you run out, once you've taken on too much debt... you'll get in trouble.