3 ms·

You don’t know that it was “their mistake.” Unless you’ve personally successfully scaled a suite of nontrivial services equivalent to GitHub’s to accommodate an

You don’t know that it was “their mistake.” Unless you’ve personally successfully scaled a suite of nontrivial services equivalent to GitHub’s to accommodate an unexpected 14x increase in traffic, you respectfully have no basis for such an assertion.

qotgalaxy 6mo ago
[dead]
mattmanser 6mo ago
Yeah, they should be testing for that, right? I think there's a lot of people reading comments like yours and thinking, is this person a paid shill or what? The earn bucket loads of money, they should be planning for exactly that. And testing for it via load testing every day. Perhaps you've forgotten the days of GitHub presenting themselves of software engineering thought leaders.
- c-hendricks 6mo ago
  > Perhaps you've forgotten the days of GitHub presenting themselves of software engineering thought leaders Genuinely could use a refresher here.
- otterley 6mo ago
  I’ve worked at some very well-endowed organizations. Having money is no guarantee of a particular outcome. There is a lot of money chasing a limited supply of talent. Moreover, distributed systems that were built long ago with certain assumptions can’t be refactored as quickly as the HN populace might believe. The Mythical Man-Month is a popular book for a reason.
dijit 6mo ago
I have. You could argue the scales are different, but computers are also faster now. So, argument to credentialism out of the way... What should we do as consumers if a provider that is a defacto monopoly due to network effects stops functioning? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947719 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jharasym/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jharasym/
- otterley 6mo ago
  > You could argue the scales are different, but computers are also faster now. Scale is everything and a faster computer doesn’t always help. Vertical scaling has limits, and complex distributed systems are complex. Since you seem to possess a diagnosis and remedy with a reasonable amount of certainty, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you and have you fix all their problems for them. Especially if you can do it while not making the problem worse in any dimension.
  - dijit 6mo ago
    The link in my previous comment answers the credentials question in detail- including specific technical post-mortems on horizontally scaled stateful systems. Vertical scaling wasn't the topic.
    - otterley 6mo ago
      You’re missing the point: a doctor doesn’t diagnose and practice medicine on a patient he hasn’t thoroughly evaluated himself. This is the sort of wisdom that a staff engineer and CTO is expected to have earned.
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  > I have. I skimmed your profile. Working on the infrastructure for a couple mid-tier video games is a cool accomplishment, but equating this to having solved GitHub level scale rings hollow. GitHub has a couple orders of magnitude more daily active visitors than the games you worked on had at their peak. You can make valid criticisms of GitHub without trying to reduce their scale or inflate your credentials to create a false equivalence.
  - cnewey 6mo ago
    I'm not sure that resorting to personal attacks against the parent commenter for making a legitimate critique is the right, fair, sensible, or mature approach here. Discarding legitimate criticism based on some self-determined criteria of intellectual superiority isn't a good look. It smacks of elitism and isn't something conducive to a productive and positive community discussion. It is unhelpful, rude, condescending, and completely fails to address the underlying problem.

qotgalaxy 6mo ago

[dead]

mattmanser 6mo ago

Yeah, they should be testing for that, right? I think there's a lot of people reading comments like yours and thinking, is this person a paid shill or what? The earn bucket loads of money, they should be planning for exactly that. And testing for it via load testing every day. Perhaps you've forgotten the days of GitHub presenting themselves of software engineering thought leaders.

c-hendricks 6mo ago
> Perhaps you've forgotten the days of GitHub presenting themselves of software engineering thought leaders Genuinely could use a refresher here.
otterley 6mo ago
I’ve worked at some very well-endowed organizations. Having money is no guarantee of a particular outcome. There is a lot of money chasing a limited supply of talent. Moreover, distributed systems that were built long ago with certain assumptions can’t be refactored as quickly as the HN populace might believe. The Mythical Man-Month is a popular book for a reason.

dijit 6mo ago

I have. You could argue the scales are different, but computers are also faster now. So, argument to credentialism out of the way... What should we do as consumers if a provider that is a defacto monopoly due to network effects stops functioning? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947719 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jharasym/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jharasym/

otterley 6mo ago
> You could argue the scales are different, but computers are also faster now. Scale is everything and a faster computer doesn’t always help. Vertical scaling has limits, and complex distributed systems are complex. Since you seem to possess a diagnosis and remedy with a reasonable amount of certainty, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you and have you fix all their problems for them. Especially if you can do it while not making the problem worse in any dimension.
- dijit 6mo ago
  The link in my previous comment answers the credentials question in detail- including specific technical post-mortems on horizontally scaled stateful systems. Vertical scaling wasn't the topic.
  - otterley 6mo ago
    You’re missing the point: a doctor doesn’t diagnose and practice medicine on a patient he hasn’t thoroughly evaluated himself. This is the sort of wisdom that a staff engineer and CTO is expected to have earned.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
Aurornis 6mo ago
> I have. I skimmed your profile. Working on the infrastructure for a couple mid-tier video games is a cool accomplishment, but equating this to having solved GitHub level scale rings hollow. GitHub has a couple orders of magnitude more daily active visitors than the games you worked on had at their peak. You can make valid criticisms of GitHub without trying to reduce their scale or inflate your credentials to create a false equivalence.
- cnewey 6mo ago
  I'm not sure that resorting to personal attacks against the parent commenter for making a legitimate critique is the right, fair, sensible, or mature approach here. Discarding legitimate criticism based on some self-determined criteria of intellectual superiority isn't a good look. It smacks of elitism and isn't something conducive to a productive and positive community discussion. It is unhelpful, rude, condescending, and completely fails to address the underlying problem.