Billions

In the physical world everything is expensive. If you don't have a lot of money, you have to prioritize between eating out at restaurants, going on vacation, fixing the car, shopping, saving for retirement, and other costs of living. You can't do everything.

In the virtual world everything is free, like tap water. It's hard to build software systems if you feel guilty consuming virtual resources.

• You try to avoid creating lots of database tables and columns.
• You never think to save lots of immutable versions.
• You feel uncomfortable using lots of dependencies.
• You avoid storing granular data.
• You feel guilty deploying large container images.
• You optimize HTML pages.
• You combine things that should stay separate to aviod provisioning new infrastructure.
• You refuse to pay for anything that would save time because it costs money.

Thought Experiment

Imagine how you would feel writing code if you were a billionaire. You would take whatever you need without hesitation. You would never slow down to optimize the inconsequential.

Virtual resources are free, like tap water. You have GBs of memory, GBs of storage, GHz of compute. In the virtual world you're a billionaire. So code like one.