iamricks

I work at a very small company and our products are not used by a lot of users. Our stack is very simple: Rails/Heroku/Redis/Postgres

I spend time reading about larger scale systems and watching talks about how big companies have scaled their products and the challenges they face and its given me a general understanding about some scaling techniques.

Is there some way i can try to implement some of these things and test to make sure that the way i implemented it works without having to spend a bunch of money?

For example if i want to try making a distributed cache, test sharding a database, create a messaging queue and test it, how can i do this?

I can't login to Heroku, there seems to be some authentication issue.

How do you guys approach the "start" of reading a code base?

I never know where to start looking, specifically if its a language i am not too familiar with i have no idea where to start and sometimes i have no idea where the program execution starts.

Is there maybe a ladder of small to large open source projects that can get you there?

For example i have no idea how to begin reading the Flask(1) open source code.

What approach can i take to get to a point where i can analyze a project like Flask and get something meaningful from it?

(1) https://github.com/pallets/flask