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Oh Shit: How to Break a Large Website (and how not to) -- PDF version

scribd.com

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Re: Oh Shit: How to Break a Large Website (and how not to) -- PDF version

#3
Am I the only person who's shocked by the idea that one of Scribd's developers was repeatedly taking down the website by pushing code live without testing it or understanding the queries it ran?

I guess maybe he's just exaggerating for entertainment value... It's good to see that he's sharing his mistakes for others to learn from, and going into detail on why things went wrong. However, it's really depressing to not see any attention paid to the root causes - WTF wasn't he testing his code?

Re: Oh Shit: How to Break a Large Website (and how not to) -- PDF version

#4
Somewhat OT: is it just me or does anyone else find it utterly ironic that scribd, a site dedicated to helping people avoid dealing with the PDF browser plugin mess, is intentionally going through the trouble of converting their source document to PDF just so they can display it in their viewer?

There's dogfooding, and then there's this. I'm not sure what to make of it.

Re: Oh Shit: How to Break a Large Website (and how not to) -- PDF version

#5

Am I the only person who's shocked by the idea that one of Scribd's developers was repeatedly taking down the website by pushing code live without testing it or understanding the queries it ran? I guess maybe he's just exaggerating for entertainment value... It's good to see that he's sharing his mistakes for others to learn from, and going into detail on why things went wrong. However, it's really depressing to not…

[deleted]

Re: Oh Shit: How to Break a Large Website (and how not to) -- PDF version

#8

Am I the only person who's shocked by the idea that one of Scribd's developers was repeatedly taking down the website by pushing code live without testing it or understanding the queries it ran? I guess maybe he's just exaggerating for entertainment value... It's good to see that he's sharing his mistakes for others to learn from, and going into detail on why things went wrong. However, it's really depressing to not…

I am completely unsurprised, and I'm not being sarcastic.

They probably think that they're using an "agile" methodology.

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