Do The Simple Thing First: The Engineering Behind Instagram

It's easy to avoid complications when you're tiny. Doing it at scale is a bigger challenge.

When Instagram arrived in the iPhone App Store in October 2010, it reflected the work of a two-person development team: founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Neither had classic software-engineering backgrounds. (At Stanford, Systrom focused on management science and Krieger studied symbolic systems.) And when it became a phenomenon—it's still the iconic example of an app that achieved blockbuster status almost the moment it existed—Systrom had to divert his attention to running the business, leaving the engineering to Krieger.

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