4 ms·
Say what you will about Twitter, but is a globally distributed database with trillions of entries, which has to add and sort and display billions of those entri
by wikwocket 6y ago
Say what you will about Twitter, but is a globally distributed database with trillions of entries, which has to add and sort and display billions of those entries in real-time for 100+ million daily active users. And it has to resist nation-state bad actors doing everything they can to corrupt it.
As a result, I would guess a lot of Twitter's engineers are working on infrastructure, internal tooling, and moderation.
Regarding your example, doubling the size of a tweet, that was probably more work than one dev writing ALTER TABLE tweets MODIFY tweet_text VARCHAR(280). In fact, I don't know if you were around 20 years ago or so, but there was a similarly scoped project to double the number of digits we were storing the year in. ;)