FarmVille co-creator Luke Rajlich talks scaling products quickly at inaugural Philly Tech Talk

Farmville co-creator Luke Rajlich talks about scaling his product during the first Philly Tech Talk. The empty front row seats are a bit misleading (you know how people get with the front row), catch the full audience view below.

By Cheyenne Ehrlich

What does it take to scale a web product to 80 million users, the way the team behind Facebook game smash hit FarmVille did? Foresight, for one.

That’s what former FarmVille CTO Luke Rajlich told the crowd of local engineers at Monday night’s inaugural Philly Tech Talk held at First Round Capital‘s University City headquarters.

Event co-organizer and Perceptual Networks cofounder Cheyenne Ehrlich details one of the main takeaways from Rajlich’s talk:

The crowd at Monday’s Philly Tech Talk. Not pictured: obscene amounts of pizza.

For FarmVille to scale so quickly, there was a lot of intelligent design in the system architecture in advance of launch.  They also anticipated the failures of servers and database from time to time, and they developed automated systems for addressing that.

I think it became clear that there is a real engineering challenge and expertise in scale that doesn’t get seen when you’re just building and running small sites.