Divide and Conquer.

It was while reading the Thrift white paper, and seeing this line in the conclusion that the connection hit me:

Thrift has enabled Facebook to build scalable backend services efficiently by enabling engineers to divide and conquer.

That’s exactly the point of all the various agile methodologies: enable a team to divide up the project and conquer it piece by piece.  While I’m sure we’ve all heard the phrase divide and conquer, likely in an algorithms class, sometimes it takes a random piece of informaton, like the Thrift white paper, to make the pieces click and bring the connections to light.