6 ms·

https://engineering.hellofresh.com/scaling-hellofresh-api-gateway-7d40be55450f https://engineering.hellofresh.com/scaling-hellofresh-api-ga...

by aqme28 9y ago

tnolet 9y ago
This is hilarious and sad at the same time. However, most of these write ups are aimed at attracting talent. Even more, some tech stacks are deliberately built to attract talent when the core domain is just too simple or boring. "We serve user subscriptions and recipe data from an SQL database using Rails" just doesn't sound as snappy as the infra-porn on the blog.
- opportune 9y ago
  I'd guess you're right, especially since 4/10 articles featured on their engineering homepage are obvious attempts at attracting more women / minority members of the engineering team: https://engineering.hellofresh.com/ https://engineering.hellofresh.com/
  - dimgl 9y ago
    You'd think you'd want to attract good engineers regardless of skin color or gender but what do I know?
    - kbenson 9y ago
      Eh, there are benefits to a heterogeneous environment that aren't always obvious. For example, not accidentally making racist software.[1] ;) 1: http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/01/12/how-we-accidentally-made-a-racist-videogame http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/01/12/how-we-accidentally-made-...
  - threeseed 9y ago
    Exactly what is wrong with encouraging more women and minorities into the industry and making them feel welcome at a company. I assume the ideal workplace for you is just a group of 20-30 year old, white males. And in your "expert" opinion where did they go wrong here. What is the correct number of articles they should post on any particular subject in order to get the HN tick of approval ?
    - mopierotti 9y ago
      I'm not the op, but I would charitably assume that they meant that those blog posts demonstrate that the blog's strongly geared toward attracting talent.
    - opportune 9y ago
      What? I was just remarking that their engineering blog seems to be more recruiting focused than focused on the actual technical achievements of the company. I was not at all commenting on whether those posts were good or bad.
      - jbattle 9y ago
        I'd wager the vast majority of company tech blogs are maintained with exactly that goal in mind. And in my opinion that's totally reasonable. Done well it helps people understand more about the people, technical philosophy, and problems faced by that team
  - ianamartin 9y ago
    Oh my god. This checks off all the boxes for companies I would never work at. Starting with this nugget: >Our gateway is on the frontline of our infrastructure. It >receives thousands of request per day. LOL! Wat???!!! Thousands of requests per day. Thousands. Not per hour or per second. Per day. Call out the big guns, people! We need cutting edge enterprise-scale architecture! A boring rails app or a flask app will never be able to handle this kind of scale!! I don't even need to go farther down the checklist than that. You're putting all of that complexity and infrastructure and problems-waiting-to-happen behind an API that serves thousands of requests per day. Yeah, I'd rather be homeless than work on that team. Jesus.
    - mythrwy 9y ago
      Shhh... 3 guys and Flask app don't employee as many people as a large team drawing diagrams on whiteboards and working on "infrastructure". Next you are going to be criticizing 3GB big data databases with dedicated sys admins. Sometimes I wonder how much of this is some type of "jobs program". A transfer of money from the financial sector back to the grunt sector via VC.
      - rpcope1 9y ago
        3GB database might even still be appropriate SQLite territory, especially if you're not super write heavy. :)
- threeseed 9y ago
  Your attitude frankly sucks. How can it be a bad thing for developers to write about what they are working on ? Not all developers are genius experts who suddenly woke up one day and instantly knew how to perfectly architect a system. People learn, people grow, people make mistakes and most importantly people need feedback. Blogs like this are fantastic to (a) learn what other people are doing and (b) for developers to have an opportunity to show off and be proud of what they are working on. Especially since the rest of the company in most cases isn't going to care less.
  - sbov 9y ago
    It's great to write about your tech. But unless blogging is your business model, it's not great to pick your tech so you can write about it.
- taneq 9y ago
  Isn't that kind of thing a real red flag for the kind of talent you'd want to attract? If someone told me they'd built a GPU compute cluster for their phpbb based social club forum, I'd think they were an idiot and not want to work with them.
  - BigJono 9y ago
    Absolutely. I'm running into this problem constantly in the front-end dev world. Most developers I talk to are way too eager to list off a million cool techs that they're familiar with, most of which are completely inappropriate for the job at hand. If I'm interviewing a candidate, I'm not interested in which tools they know how to use. I'm interested in whether they understand the problem those tools solve and when to apply them. Over-engineering is problem #1 with the community at large in front-end dev at the moment and you'll go a long way as an engineering team if you make it your priority to defeat that mentality.
  - keganunderwood 9y ago
    I am sorry if I'm completely off base but I'm still thinking about the danluu page on options v cash which quotes this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11200296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11200296 Maybe startups don't want the absolute best of the best but rather the best of the gullible? Edit and or poor
    - taneq 9y ago
      So you're thinking that kind of technical mark-missing is the startup equivalent of the typos and other glaring errors in email scams? They're to weed out the people smart enough to be a problem?
- lacampbell 9y ago
  If I'm ever in a position when I'm needing to attract talent, that would not the kind of talent I want to attract. I'd want grumpy, paranoid sysadmins who really don't want to be woken up late at night because something has gone wrong.
lgas 9y ago
...with only 10+ high-CPU large machines.
- btym 9y ago
  With that level of traffic, they could run their entire frontend from a smartphone...
  - lacampbell 9y ago
    Why did you have to type that. Now in my free time there's a 50/50 chance I am going to waste minutes or even hours looking into the viability of running a postgres/sinatra/nginx app on a phone. Something about that appeals to me in a huge way. Showing people my "server room", etc etc.
    - ProblemFactory 9y ago
      Attach the phone to a small weather balloon, and you can have a real "cloud hosted" setup.
    - fapjacks 9y ago
      Plot twist: Run it from a flip phone.
    - hengheng 9y ago
      There's a bunch of httpd apps on the Play Store, many complete with database engines and all that.
  - kgilpin 9y ago
    Phones are expensive. Raspberry Pi.
x0x0 9y ago
ergh, you weren't kidding. I hope that was a typo on their part; even low thousands rpm is mostly not a big deal on modern hardware. Our gateway is on the frontline of our infrastructure. It receives thousands of request per day, and for that reason we chose Go when building it, because of its performance, simplicity, and elegant solution to concurrency.
- gaius 9y ago
  For all we know the blog is a work of fiction and they're running off a laptop...
mhuffman 9y ago
Holy shit! I almost didn't believe you. Then again, if they didn't have that beefy infrastructure, they could get DDOS'd from up to multiple request per minute! I mean you can't be too careful when you are in that league!!1! Also interesting (in the same way as rubbernecking a car crash) is going to their homepage and viewing source.
squeaky-clean 9y ago
I didn't want to share the original article, but you found it :) Then again, Google search doesn't turn up many other results bragging about thousands of requests per day.
jethro_tell 9y ago
'Dashboards around the office show how the system is performing at any given time.' Probably was someone's full time job for a couple months. When was this written? Why is there no year in the date?
- __jal 9y ago
  Granted, HDMI can be infuriating, but months? More seriously, you can set this up with KPIs in a day with Zabbix. A week, if you've never dealt with Zabbix, which is admittedly somewhat complex compared to some of the others.
  - lilbobbytables 9y ago
    Depends on what you're trying to accomplish. But setting up a data warehouse that builds out the KPIs you're looking for along with a dashboard to display them (the easy part, for sure) can certainly take over a month.
jogundas 9y ago
I am surprised they are still up, given the amount of attention from the HN community ;-)
- mhuffman 9y ago
  I think their CDNs are saving their 10+ High CPU servers from the load.

https://engineering.hellofresh.com/scaling-hellofresh-api-gateway-7d40be55450f https://engineering.hellofresh.com/scaling-hellofresh-api-ga...

by aqme28 9y ago

https://engineering.hellofresh.com/scaling-hellofresh-api-gateway-7d40be55450f https://engineering.hellofresh.com/scaling-hellofresh-api-ga...

tnolet 9y ago

This is hilarious and sad at the same time. However, most of these write ups are aimed at attracting talent. Even more, some tech stacks are deliberately built to attract talent when the core domain is just too simple or boring. "We serve user subscriptions and recipe data from an SQL database using Rails" just doesn't sound as snappy as the infra-porn on the blog.

opportune 9y ago
I'd guess you're right, especially since 4/10 articles featured on their engineering homepage are obvious attempts at attracting more women / minority members of the engineering team: https://engineering.hellofresh.com/ https://engineering.hellofresh.com/
- dimgl 9y ago
  You'd think you'd want to attract good engineers regardless of skin color or gender but what do I know?
  - kbenson 9y ago
    Eh, there are benefits to a heterogeneous environment that aren't always obvious. For example, not accidentally making racist software.[1] ;) 1: http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/01/12/how-we-accidentally-made-a-racist-videogame http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/01/12/how-we-accidentally-made-...
- threeseed 9y ago
  Exactly what is wrong with encouraging more women and minorities into the industry and making them feel welcome at a company. I assume the ideal workplace for you is just a group of 20-30 year old, white males. And in your "expert" opinion where did they go wrong here. What is the correct number of articles they should post on any particular subject in order to get the HN tick of approval ?
  - mopierotti 9y ago
    I'm not the op, but I would charitably assume that they meant that those blog posts demonstrate that the blog's strongly geared toward attracting talent.
  - opportune 9y ago
    What? I was just remarking that their engineering blog seems to be more recruiting focused than focused on the actual technical achievements of the company. I was not at all commenting on whether those posts were good or bad.
    - jbattle 9y ago
      I'd wager the vast majority of company tech blogs are maintained with exactly that goal in mind. And in my opinion that's totally reasonable. Done well it helps people understand more about the people, technical philosophy, and problems faced by that team
- ianamartin 9y ago
  Oh my god. This checks off all the boxes for companies I would never work at. Starting with this nugget: >Our gateway is on the frontline of our infrastructure. It >receives thousands of request per day. LOL! Wat???!!! Thousands of requests per day. Thousands. Not per hour or per second. Per day. Call out the big guns, people! We need cutting edge enterprise-scale architecture! A boring rails app or a flask app will never be able to handle this kind of scale!! I don't even need to go farther down the checklist than that. You're putting all of that complexity and infrastructure and problems-waiting-to-happen behind an API that serves thousands of requests per day. Yeah, I'd rather be homeless than work on that team. Jesus.
  - mythrwy 9y ago
    Shhh... 3 guys and Flask app don't employee as many people as a large team drawing diagrams on whiteboards and working on "infrastructure". Next you are going to be criticizing 3GB big data databases with dedicated sys admins. Sometimes I wonder how much of this is some type of "jobs program". A transfer of money from the financial sector back to the grunt sector via VC.
    - rpcope1 9y ago
      3GB database might even still be appropriate SQLite territory, especially if you're not super write heavy. :)
threeseed 9y ago
Your attitude frankly sucks. How can it be a bad thing for developers to write about what they are working on ? Not all developers are genius experts who suddenly woke up one day and instantly knew how to perfectly architect a system. People learn, people grow, people make mistakes and most importantly people need feedback. Blogs like this are fantastic to (a) learn what other people are doing and (b) for developers to have an opportunity to show off and be proud of what they are working on. Especially since the rest of the company in most cases isn't going to care less.
- sbov 9y ago
  It's great to write about your tech. But unless blogging is your business model, it's not great to pick your tech so you can write about it.
taneq 9y ago
Isn't that kind of thing a real red flag for the kind of talent you'd want to attract? If someone told me they'd built a GPU compute cluster for their phpbb based social club forum, I'd think they were an idiot and not want to work with them.
- BigJono 9y ago
  Absolutely. I'm running into this problem constantly in the front-end dev world. Most developers I talk to are way too eager to list off a million cool techs that they're familiar with, most of which are completely inappropriate for the job at hand. If I'm interviewing a candidate, I'm not interested in which tools they know how to use. I'm interested in whether they understand the problem those tools solve and when to apply them. Over-engineering is problem #1 with the community at large in front-end dev at the moment and you'll go a long way as an engineering team if you make it your priority to defeat that mentality.
- keganunderwood 9y ago
  I am sorry if I'm completely off base but I'm still thinking about the danluu page on options v cash which quotes this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11200296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11200296 Maybe startups don't want the absolute best of the best but rather the best of the gullible? Edit and or poor
  - taneq 9y ago
    So you're thinking that kind of technical mark-missing is the startup equivalent of the typos and other glaring errors in email scams? They're to weed out the people smart enough to be a problem?
lacampbell 9y ago
If I'm ever in a position when I'm needing to attract talent, that would not the kind of talent I want to attract. I'd want grumpy, paranoid sysadmins who really don't want to be woken up late at night because something has gone wrong.

lgas 9y ago

...with only 10+ high-CPU large machines.

btym 9y ago
With that level of traffic, they could run their entire frontend from a smartphone...
- lacampbell 9y ago
  Why did you have to type that. Now in my free time there's a 50/50 chance I am going to waste minutes or even hours looking into the viability of running a postgres/sinatra/nginx app on a phone. Something about that appeals to me in a huge way. Showing people my "server room", etc etc.
  - ProblemFactory 9y ago
    Attach the phone to a small weather balloon, and you can have a real "cloud hosted" setup.
  - fapjacks 9y ago
    Plot twist: Run it from a flip phone.
  - hengheng 9y ago
    There's a bunch of httpd apps on the Play Store, many complete with database engines and all that.
- kgilpin 9y ago
  Phones are expensive. Raspberry Pi.

x0x0 9y ago

ergh, you weren't kidding. I hope that was a typo on their part; even low thousands rpm is mostly not a big deal on modern hardware. Our gateway is on the frontline of our infrastructure. It receives thousands of request per day, and for that reason we chose Go when building it, because of its performance, simplicity, and elegant solution to concurrency.

gaius 9y ago
For all we know the blog is a work of fiction and they're running off a laptop...

mhuffman 9y ago

Holy shit! I almost didn't believe you. Then again, if they didn't have that beefy infrastructure, they could get DDOS'd from up to multiple request per minute! I mean you can't be too careful when you are in that league!!1! Also interesting (in the same way as rubbernecking a car crash) is going to their homepage and viewing source.

squeaky-clean 9y ago

I didn't want to share the original article, but you found it :) Then again, Google search doesn't turn up many other results bragging about thousands of requests per day.

jethro_tell 9y ago

'Dashboards around the office show how the system is performing at any given time.' Probably was someone's full time job for a couple months. When was this written? Why is there no year in the date?

__jal 9y ago
Granted, HDMI can be infuriating, but months? More seriously, you can set this up with KPIs in a day with Zabbix. A week, if you've never dealt with Zabbix, which is admittedly somewhat complex compared to some of the others.
- lilbobbytables 9y ago
  Depends on what you're trying to accomplish. But setting up a data warehouse that builds out the KPIs you're looking for along with a dashboard to display them (the easy part, for sure) can certainly take over a month.

jogundas 9y ago

I am surprised they are still up, given the amount of attention from the HN community ;-)

mhuffman 9y ago
I think their CDNs are saving their 10+ High CPU servers from the load.