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(ex-twitter engineer) I left before this project got started, and do not have any insider info on how they did it. Given what I know about the number of places
by squarecog 9y ago
(ex-twitter engineer) I left before this project got started, and do not have any insider info on how they did it. Given what I know about the number of places tweet length assumptions were built into, it must have been a large, cross-team effort. It likely required thoughtful problem-solving.
Take, for example, search. An early iteration of Twitter search relied on this limit to pack term positions into 8 bits (Source: https://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/publications/Busch_etal_ICDE2012.pdf https://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/publications/Busch_etal...). 280 > 256, so if this was still around, the whole approach had to be rebuilt, and the indexes recreated. That's ... non-trivial. And that's just one subsystem.
- akkartik 9y agoWow, sounds like Y2K.
- Xorlev 9y agoAt the volume Twitter works at, you take the constraints you can find.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- roymurdock 9y agoEven more of a reason not to make this large, system breaking change.
- okr 9y agoAnd i can imagine, when they just doubled the amount of possible characters, they just correlate these tweet buckets now. Like, maybe each tweet already had space for attributes/opcodes, so one can express things like "deleted". Maybe there is another attribute now: "has successors". And in the API one just return many tweets as one. In that way, one does not have to rewrite history. But who knows!