6 ms·

Musk: We'll just need to do a total rewrite to have a high velocity of features

31 points by iudqnolq 4y ago

playingalong 4y ago
Did SpaceX or Tesla go through a total rewrite? (As far as the public knows)
- ksherlock 4y ago
  About once a year, Musk announces FSD is getting a total rewrite.
jstx1 4y ago
Fascinating. Bad approach from the other party though - they should have let Elon keep talking and display more ignorance instead of confronting him and pointing out that he's clueless. Just play along, and give him little nudges and more directions to take wild swings at. Keep asking questions about things he knows nothing about and let him give wrong answers with pretend-confidence.
cs702 4y ago
Musk is right in wanting "high velocity of features," i.e., the ability to evolve Twitter faster. How deeply he understands the technical details does not matter that much, as long as he has capable technical people working with him. It's likely that they are the ones telling Musk they need to rewrite big chunks of Twitter's infrastructure. Given that WhatsApp was able to grow to ~500 million users with only 32 employees, it's quite possible they're right. I'm reminded of this confrontational interaction between a technical person and Steve Jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o -- in hindsight, Jobs was right: "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology," not the other way around. In Twitter's case, they've got to start with what's important -- being able to try out a lot of new ideas quickly and cheaply to find out which ones work. The exact details of how they accomplish that are of secondary importance.
- jstx1 4y ago
  > Elon is right in wanting "high velocity of features," He's proposing a ridiculous solution that will have the exact opposite effect of what he wants. The only thing in common with the Steve Jobs clip is that both interactions are somewhat confrontational. Jobs is talking about how the user experience is important and engineering is secondary, Musk tries to solve Twitter's problems by asking the engineers to rewrite things that already work fine.
  - TigeriusKirk 4y ago
    So the current stack supports a high velocity of features?
    - dzhiurgis 4y ago
      Geohot mentioned 3TB of codebase and resigned basically because he wanted to refactor shit while elon wants featurezzzz
    - guax 4y ago
      At Twitter scale. What stack would? Every new feature needs to work for 200m people in 100s of languages, across devices and browsers. Tell me what stack can support uncautious throw anything at the wall strategy. Hell tell me one team of 20 people that can do that.
  - cs702 4y ago
    > ... that will have the exact opposite effect of what he wants. You don't know that. Time will tell who is right!
- badwolf 4y ago
  It's important to remember that Twitter is not, in fact, Whatsapp. A person-to-person messaging app is going to be far less complex than a global social network. Bringing up "Whatsapp only had 32 employees" seems like a lazy point to make to handwave away any actual arguments.
uberman 4y ago
Just to be clear, the guy challenging Musk on his "off the cuff" BS about velocity and the twitter stack is: Currently JVMs & Performance stuff at @Netflix. Previously JVMs & performative stuff at @Twitter.
jacquesm 4y ago
That's pretty much what killed Netscape. The temptation for a new person to say 'throw it all away' is always there, it takes a lot of restraint to tell yourself that whoever built it probably wasn't a complete idiot so if you're going to rewrite it you will have to find an incremental path so that you don't end up re-learning all of the lessons from the past the hard way. The need to learn all those lessons the hard way seems to be the common element in Elon Musks' strategy so far so in a way this is consistent. But it will absolutely kill Twitter, if there was any way out so far (which I don't believe there was), just in a different way.
readonthegoapp 4y ago
he gave musk the 'buddy' treatment. musk went with the tried and true 'who are you?'. 'total rewrite' is comedy gold. unless you're a Tesla investor maybe.
camjohnson26 4y ago
This is not a real solution, and not a decision an experienced CTO would make. It’s been a programming meme since the early 2000s that rewrites are an alluring fix to problems, but underestimate the complexity of existing code. Joel Spolsky’s classic article is a great introduction to this line of thinking: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
yumraj 4y ago
So, the people sucked (he laid off 75% of them), the code sucks ( he’ll be rewriting it), many users suck ( he banned many of them), several features sucked (he’s changing things on the fly).. So, did he buy Twitter just for the brand, and some users?
- camjohnson26 4y ago
  Well he’s the most followed user so it can’t be that. And he’s done a great job of destroying Twitter’s brand so far. At this point maybe the best explanation for his behavior is it’s all a performance art piece to see how much damage he can do in as short a time as possible. Truly astonishing to watch in real time.
entropicgravity 4y ago
Oh yes, a complete rewrite. Always the best way to go. Shouldn't take more than three months, four at the outside. Soldier on Elon.
pschuegr 4y ago
Incredible. He really should have just started from scratch. You know what has high feature velocity? Brand new projects. You know what doesn't cost $40b? Brand new projects.
extasia 4y ago
Another geohot W

31 points by iudqnolq 4y ago

playingalong 4y ago

Did SpaceX or Tesla go through a total rewrite? (As far as the public knows)

ksherlock 4y ago
About once a year, Musk announces FSD is getting a total rewrite.

jstx1 4y ago

Fascinating. Bad approach from the other party though - they should have let Elon keep talking and display more ignorance instead of confronting him and pointing out that he's clueless. Just play along, and give him little nudges and more directions to take wild swings at. Keep asking questions about things he knows nothing about and let him give wrong answers with pretend-confidence.

cs702 4y ago

Musk is right in wanting "high velocity of features," i.e., the ability to evolve Twitter faster. How deeply he understands the technical details does not matter that much, as long as he has capable technical people working with him. It's likely that they are the ones telling Musk they need to rewrite big chunks of Twitter's infrastructure. Given that WhatsApp was able to grow to ~500 million users with only 32 employees, it's quite possible they're right. I'm reminded of this confrontational interaction between a technical person and Steve Jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o -- in hindsight, Jobs was right: "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology," not the other way around. In Twitter's case, they've got to start with what's important -- being able to try out a lot of new ideas quickly and cheaply to find out which ones work. The exact details of how they accomplish that are of secondary importance.

jstx1 4y ago
> Elon is right in wanting "high velocity of features," He's proposing a ridiculous solution that will have the exact opposite effect of what he wants. The only thing in common with the Steve Jobs clip is that both interactions are somewhat confrontational. Jobs is talking about how the user experience is important and engineering is secondary, Musk tries to solve Twitter's problems by asking the engineers to rewrite things that already work fine.
- TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  So the current stack supports a high velocity of features?
  - dzhiurgis 4y ago
    Geohot mentioned 3TB of codebase and resigned basically because he wanted to refactor shit while elon wants featurezzzz
  - guax 4y ago
    At Twitter scale. What stack would? Every new feature needs to work for 200m people in 100s of languages, across devices and browsers. Tell me what stack can support uncautious throw anything at the wall strategy. Hell tell me one team of 20 people that can do that.
- cs702 4y ago
  > ... that will have the exact opposite effect of what he wants. You don't know that. Time will tell who is right!
badwolf 4y ago
It's important to remember that Twitter is not, in fact, Whatsapp. A person-to-person messaging app is going to be far less complex than a global social network. Bringing up "Whatsapp only had 32 employees" seems like a lazy point to make to handwave away any actual arguments.

uberman 4y ago

Just to be clear, the guy challenging Musk on his "off the cuff" BS about velocity and the twitter stack is: Currently JVMs & Performance stuff at @Netflix. Previously JVMs & performative stuff at @Twitter.

jacquesm 4y ago

That's pretty much what killed Netscape. The temptation for a new person to say 'throw it all away' is always there, it takes a lot of restraint to tell yourself that whoever built it probably wasn't a complete idiot so if you're going to rewrite it you will have to find an incremental path so that you don't end up re-learning all of the lessons from the past the hard way. The need to learn all those lessons the hard way seems to be the common element in Elon Musks' strategy so far so in a way this is consistent. But it will absolutely kill Twitter, if there was any way out so far (which I don't believe there was), just in a different way.

readonthegoapp 4y ago

he gave musk the 'buddy' treatment. musk went with the tried and true 'who are you?'. 'total rewrite' is comedy gold. unless you're a Tesla investor maybe.

camjohnson26 4y ago

This is not a real solution, and not a decision an experienced CTO would make. It’s been a programming meme since the early 2000s that rewrites are an alluring fix to problems, but underestimate the complexity of existing code. Joel Spolsky’s classic article is a great introduction to this line of thinking: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

yumraj 4y ago

So, the people sucked (he laid off 75% of them), the code sucks ( he’ll be rewriting it), many users suck ( he banned many of them), several features sucked (he’s changing things on the fly).. So, did he buy Twitter just for the brand, and some users?

camjohnson26 4y ago
Well he’s the most followed user so it can’t be that. And he’s done a great job of destroying Twitter’s brand so far. At this point maybe the best explanation for his behavior is it’s all a performance art piece to see how much damage he can do in as short a time as possible. Truly astonishing to watch in real time.

entropicgravity 4y ago

Oh yes, a complete rewrite. Always the best way to go. Shouldn't take more than three months, four at the outside. Soldier on Elon.

pschuegr 4y ago

Incredible. He really should have just started from scratch. You know what has high feature velocity? Brand new projects. You know what doesn't cost $40b? Brand new projects.

extasia 4y ago

Another geohot W