Some of the following may seem somewhat “basic” to the experienced software developer but in the era of “ship it” early and often, you often have to play catch up and learn even the basics as you go.  Thanks Nishith and team socialmedian/True Sparrow for helping put this together.

1. Fetching data for your newsfeed (latest activities of your friends) is very costly. Think about a push mechanism instead of pull mechanism.


2. Storing large chunks of data in database (for example, entire blog post) would hurt us in the long run when the table size increases to million plus records.


3. Queries: avoid joins. No exceptions to this rule.


4. FB Connect: authentication problems. Page gets stuck at times. A blank page has to load first and then the logged-in page. Requires a lot of tweaking.


5. SEO - pay attention to that from the beginning.


6. Any component/module in site should be UTF-8 enabled.


7. Pay attention to yslow.


8. Strictly follow the XHTML standards.


9. Combine JS and CSS files.


10. Files like Srciptaculous and Prototype should be loaded directly from the Google Ajax Libraries API


11. Design the datab