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A little off topic, but was anyone else bothered by the fact that his picture is overlapping the navigation buttons on Ubuntu Firefox so that I can't click 'Hom

by acabal 16y ago

A little off topic, but was anyone else bothered by the fact that his picture is overlapping the navigation buttons on Ubuntu Firefox so that I can't click 'Home', 'TL;DR', or 'Archives'? This plus the fact that I'm looking at a web developer's website made me think twice about what he had to say without even having read it. Edit: having read this, the guy sounds like a hack. While I don't use Tumblr myself, the author makes a lot of baseless assumptions about Tumblr's systems as if they were fact. For all he (or we) know, there might be good technical reasons why things aren't aligned with his own blogging nirvana. Having been on the author's side of the table (the customer who is also a developer) along with Tumblr's side (the big company with a probably complex back-end), I want to say that when the author makes totally unverified assumptions about how a site's SELECT queries work, pulls percentages out of thin air, and smacks the table and shouting "BUT THIS FEATURE SHOULD BE SO EASY TO IMPLEMENT, ARG, LOOK HOW THEY 'HACKED' IT TOGETHER," it just highlight the author's ignorance. Edit 2: Wow, bashing them for having their picture taken with a celebrity you don't like? Saying they're a bad service and calling them slackers because they don't have a revenue model yet? Really?! How did this even get on HN?

zach-inglis 16y ago
If you think less of me because my website has only been out for 3 days and has issues, then you are being hypocritical. I know what I am talking about too. I have worked on small sites upto ones with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. I realise they have scaling issues but let's be fair: Twitter had less of a problem. So you are saying it's well put together? I have made plenty of examples on how it fails and on its serious lack of stability. I have heard many a person say they has issues. If they had behaved with grace at all throughout my dealings with them, maybe I would be more sympathetic. Remember, politeness is free and there is no scalability issues with that one. Its not about which celebrity, it's about there're being serious cries from me and many other tumblrs about the issues and all they do is roll out new features and faff about. As much as you want to call me a hack you have to admit one of the worst things to do to a codebase that has issues is add yet more features before you stabalize what you have.
- acabal 16y ago
  1. You should look up the definition of hypocritical. 2. I have never used the service and I have said so. That doesn't mean your many of your arguments still aren't based on foundationless assumption and ad-hominem internet rage. If you're going to call a service out on back-end specifics and hard numbers, you'd better be prepared to cite those, or get called out on it yourself. If there's anything I've learned in a career of cleaning up other people's apparent development messes, it's that making assumptions about a codebase without having seen it is one of the big mistakes a developer can make. You (nor I, nor anyone but the owners) have no idea what sort of problems their codebase is designed to surmount, what kind of hardware they have to make do with, or the codebase's evolutionary history, or really anything about their back-end. Making those kinds of assumptions shows a sort of narrow "I know what I'm talking about enough to assume" mindset that makes me, a person unfamiliar with Tumblr, wary of the article as a whole.
  - zachinglis 16y ago
    You're hypocritical with your anti-flaming flaming. Oh, I agree to an extent. But I have never seen any website have so many troubles. If I coded a website as half working as that (and here people will mention that my 3 day old website had an issue of an overlapping div) I would be ashamed of myself. Yet they are egotistical and rude, as I have shown. They have no lack of resources (10 million in funding) and a ton of staff. The community as a whole is quite unhappy. Yet they focus their time on getting famous people joining rather than trying to satisfy the people who stay. I would call myself a Power User. I have used it more than your average user and so I do experience a great volume. But tell me this; how has Twitter never been as bad, when it has served so many more requests.
    - novum 16y ago
      > But tell me this; how has Twitter never been as bad, when it has served so many more requests. Twitter has been that bad. Probably worse, in 2008 and parts of last year. Even 2010 has seen its fair share of fail whales.
PStamatiou 16y ago
> having read this, the guy sounds like a hack If you do a little Googling you'll quickly find out that Zach is quite the accomplished developer. http://workingwithrails.com/person/7805-zach-inglis http://workingwithrails.com/person/7805-zach-inglis "Ranking: #46 out of 17943 people"

by acabal 16y ago

zach-inglis 16y ago

If you think less of me because my website has only been out for 3 days and has issues, then you are being hypocritical. I know what I am talking about too. I have worked on small sites upto ones with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. I realise they have scaling issues but let's be fair: Twitter had less of a problem. So you are saying it's well put together? I have made plenty of examples on how it fails and on its serious lack of stability. I have heard many a person say they has issues. If they had behaved with grace at all throughout my dealings with them, maybe I would be more sympathetic. Remember, politeness is free and there is no scalability issues with that one. Its not about which celebrity, it's about there're being serious cries from me and many other tumblrs about the issues and all they do is roll out new features and faff about. As much as you want to call me a hack you have to admit one of the worst things to do to a codebase that has issues is add yet more features before you stabalize what you have.

acabal 16y ago
1. You should look up the definition of hypocritical. 2. I have never used the service and I have said so. That doesn't mean your many of your arguments still aren't based on foundationless assumption and ad-hominem internet rage. If you're going to call a service out on back-end specifics and hard numbers, you'd better be prepared to cite those, or get called out on it yourself. If there's anything I've learned in a career of cleaning up other people's apparent development messes, it's that making assumptions about a codebase without having seen it is one of the big mistakes a developer can make. You (nor I, nor anyone but the owners) have no idea what sort of problems their codebase is designed to surmount, what kind of hardware they have to make do with, or the codebase's evolutionary history, or really anything about their back-end. Making those kinds of assumptions shows a sort of narrow "I know what I'm talking about enough to assume" mindset that makes me, a person unfamiliar with Tumblr, wary of the article as a whole.
- zachinglis 16y ago
  You're hypocritical with your anti-flaming flaming. Oh, I agree to an extent. But I have never seen any website have so many troubles. If I coded a website as half working as that (and here people will mention that my 3 day old website had an issue of an overlapping div) I would be ashamed of myself. Yet they are egotistical and rude, as I have shown. They have no lack of resources (10 million in funding) and a ton of staff. The community as a whole is quite unhappy. Yet they focus their time on getting famous people joining rather than trying to satisfy the people who stay. I would call myself a Power User. I have used it more than your average user and so I do experience a great volume. But tell me this; how has Twitter never been as bad, when it has served so many more requests.
  - novum 16y ago
    > But tell me this; how has Twitter never been as bad, when it has served so many more requests. Twitter has been that bad. Probably worse, in 2008 and parts of last year. Even 2010 has seen its fair share of fail whales.

PStamatiou 16y ago

> having read this, the guy sounds like a hack If you do a little Googling you'll quickly find out that Zach is quite the accomplished developer. http://workingwithrails.com/person/7805-zach-inglis http://workingwithrails.com/person/7805-zach-inglis "Ranking: #46 out of 17943 people"