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Meh... they could have rewritten the site from the ground up, including any sort of data migration, multiple times over by now. I have never worked there, but o
by opmac 7y ago
Meh... they could have rewritten the site from the ground up, including any sort of data migration, multiple times over by now. I have never worked there, but outside looking in, it seems like there is a significant lack of technical vision from them.
Other big players like Facebook, Twitter, etc, are literally inventing pivotal parts of the modern web technical stack. What has come out of reddit?
- joatmon-snoo 7y ago> including any sort of data migration, multiple times over by now Someone's never done a data migration while serving 1M+ qps!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ses1984 7y agoBut they have had downtime, it's not like downtime for a migration would damage their reputation.
- sethammons 7y agoI've come close to that many, many times with zero downtime. It does take planning, more than many folks would think. But it can be done as long as you think it through.
- arcticfox 7y agoI've never done anything close to that scale of migration, but I also can't really imagine taking an approach that feels like a huge migration. I feel like I would try to strangle the old app (putting proxies in front and redirecting endpoints as they're rewritten) rather than swapping it out wholesale. At that point I don't know if it really counts as a migration as much as just development. Any thoughts on that approach? Is that what you have done, or was it a more holistic swap over?
- joatmon-snoo 7y agoThat isn't a data migration, that's a release.
- dna_polymerase 7y ago> they could have rewritten the site from the ground up, including any sort of data migration, multiple times over by now. Sigh, every. fucking. time. > I have never worked there, ... or anywhere else where high traffic is involved, right? It's always the people without any real world experience who come up with these BS claims about how everyone else is stupid and how it could be done differently. > ... but outside looking in, it seems like there is a significant lack of technical vision from them. Exactly. You are looking from the outside at it. If you really think they lack vision you could make tons of money working for them and fixing their site, but you already knew that since you're not lacking vision, am I right? Seriously there are lots of good engineers working at reddit, learn about their constraints first before pissing all over their work in an uninformed HN comment.
- chillwaves 7y agoDo you have specific insight into working at Reddit?
- opmac 7y agoYou've managed to say a lot without really saying anything. You make plenty of baseless assumptions about my background and ambitions... but I'm not even going to try to address my professional experience (or lack thereof) because it doesn't matter, since you're just using it as a straw man to deflect criticism. The facts are as follows: 1. Reddit is one of the highest visited websites in the world. 2. Throughout nearly their entire history, they've struggled to put together a way to make money. 3. They have notorious uptime. Of course they have talented engineers... it would be a surprise if one of the worlds most popular websites didn't. That doesn't change the facts that they continue to look and function like they're straight out of 2005 (does their search even work yet?), lack a semi decent mobile experience, and have contributed essentially nothing to the technical community in their entire history.
- juststeve 7y agoso, where is your website?
- throwaway1777 7y agoDid you miss the part where Reddit has 500 employees whereas FB has 40000? There was a point in Reddit history where there was literally 1 engineer.
- bredren 7y agoThey created a mobile app and dark patterns that pushed users to use it so they could show ads.
- inscionent 7y agoOh no! They have a business model!
- attqqq 7y agoThere’s always ethical ways to generate money, too. Opt in generosity is proven to be viable.. see: Wikipedia, All of Patreon, Etc
- Gaelan 7y agoReddit gold was that, for a long time. Presumably, it didn’t work. (Or maybe wasn’t profitable enough?)
- Bombthecat 7y agoWe are past ethical ways...
- linza 7y agoYes, oh no. Dark patterns are closer to fraud than to a legitimate business model I'd recommend to my friends and family. Nigerian princes selling you gold is a business model too.
- thatguyagain 7y agoThe company you work for, how do they make money? Do they market their products?
- linza 7y agoYes of course. What's your point? All marketing lies, and there is no spectrum, and therefore no moral ambiguity in doing shady things?
- kamaal 7y ago>>they could have rewritten the site from the ground up They did. They even tossed out Common Lisp and bought in Python because they thought it would fix their problems. It didn't.
- Deimorz 7y agoThat was in December 2005, less than 6 months after the site launched. Reddit was tiny and didn't even have subreddits or comments yet. This is what it looked like: https://web.archive.org/web/20051205025706/http://reddit.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051205025706/http://reddit.com... The problems they're dealing with 14 years later as one of the top sites on the internet aren't even slightly comparable.
- kamaal 7y agoSure, may be its time to move to something like Clojure or Golang now? Python is a good scripting language, But if you are developing backend applications for this scale you probably need some serious JVM language. Or even Golang works fine.
- Stevvo 7y agoInstagram's backend is written in python. Python is very slow, but still fast enough.
- juststeve 7y agothey could still backend to C or rust, no?