Hitting the 10M cell limit on Google Sheets with Levels.fyi
Within the last week, we hit the 10M cell limit on Google Sheets for Levels.fyi. But as true engineers, we decided to shard each workspace out into multiple separate sheets to keep things going. We’re not getting off of Google Sheets any time soon 😂
Huge props to Tanishq from our team for catching this right at the precipice of the limit, and systemizing it so that it auto-scales the number of sheets needed as we grow.
Figured we'd share some of the scaling challenges we run into as we go on our community. Also wanted to share an exciting update! We've heard your grievances, and our brand new salaries tab is coming to the app in the next few days. Stay tuned!
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If you’ve been following us at all, you'll know that Google Sheets has been a core part of our site for a long time. Google Sheets was our backend as we scaled our site to millions of users. While many of our services still utilize Google Sheets, we now have a more robust database which serves as our source of truth. That said, we still find a ton of value in Google Sheets serving as an interface, which we continue to share and use to review, segment, and aggregate data.
You can read about how we scaled to millions of users using Google Sheets as our backend on our blog post here: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-sheets.html