Please try to pay closer attention. That was my conclusion after reading what he said. He claims good Ruby code would have helped Twitter. My experience and

Please try to pay closer attention. That was my conclusion after reading what he said. He claims good Ruby code would have helped Twitter. My experience and apparently the experience of Alex and his team prove otherwise. And as for Kestrel, you can call it a crappy version of X all you care to, and it may be depending upon how requirements for X and Kestrel differ. One thing to keep in mind is that essentially the Twitter engineers are doing the software engineering equivalent of rebuilding a jet aircraft in midflight. Part of the point of having a modular architecture is to try and set up API's that act as firebreaks for intra-module changes. So if you need to switch out your message queue for performance reasons, rewriting a brand new one that conforms to the API the rest of your system expects might be the best solution at the moment. Otherwise by breaking compatibility you can set off cascading changes which require rewrites all across the system.