Something I really like about living in the city is the fact that it is made for the masses. Despite its many defects (the rain not being one), Seattle is architected to enable hundreds of thousands of people to go through their busy days. It has a transportation system that interconnects different areas, it mandates different land usage policies for parks, residences, commerces and schools, and it provides restricted parking zones. It is designed for walking (assuming you like hills), it provides easy access to hospitals and it is guarded by police and fire departments.

But Seattle wasn’t initially a big city, its growth is more of a work-in-progress kind of thing. Like many other cities including all-mighty New York, Seattle is constantly under development and re-planning so it can scale to support even more people. It needs more efficient transportation (think subway), bigger highways, more parking and more recreational areas and residential zones.

The similarities between city planning and software engineering are fascinating to me, they are well described by Sam Newman in his “Building Microservices” book. Just like cities started as small towns, most services started as simple servers sitting under someone’s desk, and processing a few hundred requests per day. Given some time and if the idea is right, a service may become popular —that’s a great thing to happen except that the challenge of increasing demand quickly turns into a problem of dealing with higher customer expectations. This is similar to how we expect better transportation and more efficient police enforcement when a town evolves into a city.