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Medium's Technology Stack

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Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#31

Post by agnivade »

Illniyar wrote: post #4

2.6 Millennia of "reading time". I just love these made-up PR metrics that can make any audience look big or any business seem successful. Really, if you write a post about infrastructure you shouldn't have a metric that say absolutely nothing about your site's load. 25 millions unique readers per month is more fitting, but still quite lacking (too big a timeframe and no way to infer how many pageviews there are).

Ha ha .. I totally agree. But marketing always claws in to posts like these. Rarely you get a objective post from a company blog.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#32

Post by agnivade »

danielvf wrote: post #29
ktu100 wrote: post #15

On this topic, I would like to get a book's recommendation on how to build a full stack product like this. Something more technical with war stories. My background: I'm a very strong iOS engineer with decent Python and JS skill. However my backend skill is limited at: building a Flask app with custom end points. It will talk to a single sql instance. I'm completely oblivious to memcache, load balancer, different AWS…

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system." -- John Gall, 1975 If you are building a new service, and doubly so if you are new to web application, you want to build your system with a minimal set of moving pieces. Ngin…

>Avoid as the plague, Docker, unless you know why you needed it.

Just wanted to add something here. Docker is great when you dont want to do setup work for a service or install unwanted software on your machine when you know it will only be used by that app. For eg - if your app used redis, you can just start a redis instance with 2 docker commands. Rather than downloading and installing it on your system.

You do not always need to dockerise your apps, you can use docker containers for dependencies too. I find it pretty nice.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#33

Post by gedrap »

abetusk wrote: post #10

I hope this doesn't come off as negative, I'm honestly curious: Why are there so many Medium stories on HN? There seems to be at least one story a day on the front page if not more. They usually have very few comments and the content often seems a little bit of a mismatch from what normally gets on the front page. I'm happy to ignore the stories and skip over them but to me that's not the point. Is someone gaming the…

> Why are there so many Medium stories on HN?

I once tried writing a story on Medium, and their editor is pretty amazing. In addition, stories on Medium do look nice and better than a significant share of Wordpress and friends themes. I'd assume that some people also publish on Medium hoping for some extra traffic driven by Medium.

So Medium could be just summed up as 'it just works'.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#34

Post by gedrap »

dang wrote: post #11
abetusk wrote: post #10

I hope this doesn't come off as negative, I'm honestly curious: Why are there so many Medium stories on HN? There seems to be at least one story a day on the front page if not more. They usually have very few comments and the content often seems a little bit of a mismatch from what normally gets on the front page. I'm happy to ignore the stories and skip over them but to me that's not the point. Is someone gaming the…

medium.com stories are penalized by default on HN, as are most sites that produce solid articles amid a lot of fluff. (If it were only fluff, we'd ban the site.) The penalty can get lifted by moderators or by software. You may be underestimating the sheer quantity of articles people post from there (dozens a day), as well as the diversity of topics in them. I took a quick look and the 6 most successful medium.com pos…

Have you considered expanding the penalization software for content aggregators (such as Medium), so that it would treat a combination of the user and the domain as the key, rather than the domain name alone?

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#35

Post by doublerebel »

A commenter on another recent submission pointed out the sudden surfacing of tech-stack-blog-posts that mention DataDog in their stack. This appears to be another such of those posts. Someone at Datadog is being clever.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#36

Post by idlewords »

dave_ops wrote: post #27

I realize they called this out in the article as "snark", but it really is just a blog engine, and its monthly web traffic is a small fraction of what wordpress.com gets (which is being served on one of the most craptacular platforms that exists). They in fact could have solved this problem with Rails or even a more full-fledged CMS like BrowserCMS.

Or Apache serving flat files.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#37

Post by jxi »

idlewords wrote: post #2

And 3 millennia of load time. EDIT: “On the web we want to stay close to the metal.”

Not sure what you're implying here. Are you saying Medium loads slowly or the fact that they used Closure makes the site load slowly?

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#38

Post by dang »

gedrap wrote: post #34
dang wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

medium.com stories are penalized by default on HN, as are most sites that produce solid articles amid a lot of fluff. (If it were only fluff, we'd ban the site.) The penalty can get lifted by moderators or by software. You may be underestimating the sheer quantity of articles people post from there (dozens a day), as well as the diversity of topics in them. I took a quick look and the 6 most successful medium.com pos…

Have you considered expanding the penalization software for content aggregators (such as Medium), so that it would treat a combination of the user and the domain as the key, rather than the domain name alone?

Yes. We haven't had a chance to think through the implications yet, but it would be good for the more substantive publications that put out articles on medium.com.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#39

Post by aikah »

sotojuan wrote: post #6
aikah wrote: post #5

TLDR; nodejs and Go on the backend , with DynamoDB clojure on the front end with their own SPA framework.

Closure[1], not Clojure. [1] https://developers.google.com/closure/library/?hl=en

You're right, I read closure but for some reasons I typed clojure, my mistake.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#40

Post by toomuchtodo »

idlewords wrote: post #36
dave_ops wrote: post #27

I realize they called this out in the article as "snark", but it really is just a blog engine, and its monthly web traffic is a small fraction of what wordpress.com gets (which is being served on one of the most craptacular platforms that exists). They in fact could have solved this problem with Rails or even a more full-fledged CMS like BrowserCMS.

Or Apache serving flat files.

Not even Apache! Just their editor with a DB backend rendering content to S3 with a CDN in front of it.
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