ShagilityAgile Data Coach, Author, Agile Data Guides · Your Agile Data Guide

Architect vs Code: Focus on Systems #substack #shorts

6 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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Shagility builds UI components for a business-intelligence platform using Svelte, pushing logic to the backend. A SELECT DISTINCT query works fine on 500 rows but fails catastrophically on 200 million rows, showing why architects need to think about scale even when they don't know every line of code.

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working on Information Product Builder, which helps me build these products faster, right? So think of it as a design system with a bunch of components, kind of like a BI tool that's using a headless platform, right? So I'm focused on the front end and everything else gets pushed to the back end as much as possible. It's all using Svelte because that's what we use for our product. And I don't understand Svelte, right? I don't even understand that code base at all. But I architecturally understand how it works. So for example, when we have a list of values on the screen, yeah, I know that if the core table behind it has, you know, a list of 500 customers, the values is dropping down and showing customers, uh, that I can let the code go do a select distinct on that table. Yeah. And it's going to perform okay. Right. I've tested it. We're all good. But I also know that if that list of values is doing a SELECT DISTINCT on a table on the backend that's got, you know, 200 million records. That's going to suck.