3 ms·

Unless they're working on new features which are needed tomorrow, one dev seems fine in the interim. The number of sysadmins is more important to keeping a site

by jarek 16y ago

Unless they're working on new features which are needed tomorrow, one dev seems fine in the interim. The number of sysadmins is more important to keeping a site running, but of course that's not what's in TC's headline.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jedberg 16y ago
Both are important. A lot of work of a reddit programmer is finding bugs that come about because of the unreliable disks and also finding scaling inflection points and fixing them before they take the site down.
thezilch 16y ago
Reddit's sysadmins neither have to maintain DC racking (nor travel), maintain hardware lifecycles, nor maintain vendor relationships. They certainly appear up to their teeth in working around AWS (EBS) deficiencies. They're not going to control a lot of their hardware, and most "fixing" of AWS pitfalls are going to come in the form of software. Now if we are talking devops, I can agree. Engineering teams this small need to wear many hats; I think jedberg has been said to have helped in development efforts, if my memory of past blogs serves right.
- jedberg 16y ago
  Yes, I do dev too. I just haven't done it in a long time. A lot of our sysadmin time is spent tracking down bugs in the stuff we use (like Cassandra) and doing tuning and automation. Also, I do a lot of the other business stuff, so at best I'm a part time sysadmin right now. We do pretty much do "devops" though. A lot of the work of Neil, our programmer, is tracking down bugs due to data inconsistencies due to hardware problems.
lowglow 16y ago
That's why they need someone from the start-up world -- both a systems guy/girl and a hacker guy/girl.
3dFlatLander 16y ago
The reddit blog linked to in the TC article says the recently hired a new sys admin, which "doubles the size of our systems administration team."

3 ms·

Unless they're working on new features which are needed tomorrow, one dev seems fine in the interim. The number of sysadmins is more important to keeping a site

by jarek 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jedberg 16y ago
Both are important. A lot of work of a reddit programmer is finding bugs that come about because of the unreliable disks and also finding scaling inflection points and fixing them before they take the site down.
thezilch 16y ago
Reddit's sysadmins neither have to maintain DC racking (nor travel), maintain hardware lifecycles, nor maintain vendor relationships. They certainly appear up to their teeth in working around AWS (EBS) deficiencies. They're not going to control a lot of their hardware, and most "fixing" of AWS pitfalls are going to come in the form of software. Now if we are talking devops, I can agree. Engineering teams this small need to wear many hats; I think jedberg has been said to have helped in development efforts, if my memory of past blogs serves right.
- jedberg 16y ago
  Yes, I do dev too. I just haven't done it in a long time. A lot of our sysadmin time is spent tracking down bugs in the stuff we use (like Cassandra) and doing tuning and automation. Also, I do a lot of the other business stuff, so at best I'm a part time sysadmin right now. We do pretty much do "devops" though. A lot of the work of Neil, our programmer, is tracking down bugs due to data inconsistencies due to hardware problems.
lowglow 16y ago
That's why they need someone from the start-up world -- both a systems guy/girl and a hacker guy/girl.
3dFlatLander 16y ago
The reddit blog linked to in the TC article says the recently hired a new sys admin, which "doubles the size of our systems administration team."