Since there are people from NYT here, can you point me in a direction to help figure out why my streaks have been all messed up the past few months? Not sure if it's an app bug or something on the backend, but puzzles are retroactively being marked as being completed perfectly when they're not. Email in bio if you'd like to discuss more.
Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
31–40 of 61 posts
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#32Doesn't this lead to vendor lock-in? All these Google proprietary services seem like they would be a big issue if they decide for whatever reason to migrate away from GCP.
well if you just use appengine without using a vendor lock-in service, i.e. using cloudsql instead of datastore, etc. than you probably won't run into trouble.
but it looks like appengine still has it's momentum (they actually added java8 support lately)
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an engineering blog post, which usually serve double duty as being both informative and also useful for recruiting ("Look at the cool stuff we are building! Come be a part of it!"). Case in point, the post ends with "we’re currently hiring for a variety of roles and career levels". In addition to not being really appropriate for nytimes.com, I'm guessing that publishing content there brings along a lot of extra…
This is really fascinating to me. Is this because engineers who they want to recruit dislike the New York Times brand, or because readers of the New York Times don't want to read things as informal as transparent blog posts about internal NYT decisions? It's very easy for me to see something like blog.newyorktimes.com with a similar design / community philosophy as Medium, but would that somehow cheapen the experienc…
I think you're over-thinking this. There isn't a huge crossover audience for engineer blog posts and general NYT audience, and I imagine the engineering blog posts do not go through the same editorial process content on nytimes.com does. That alone makes the case for using a different domain.
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not a surprise, but it is a certain kind of schadenfreude to see a bug caused purely by the sheer amount of trackers they’re forcing into their users’ browsers. It might have been a good time for them to do some internal reflection. And btw it’s not free; there is a paywall and you can subscribe to the NYT.
NYT isn't forcing these trackers into the user's browsers, ad banners are. You might say that's a distinction without a difference but I disagree, until you work with programmatic ad stuff it's difficult to fathom just how stupid it is, but also how unavoidable it is if you want to make money.
They could try a subscription model.
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#35Doesn't this lead to vendor lock-in? All these Google proprietary services seem like they would be a big issue if they decide for whatever reason to migrate away from GCP.
They can rewrite it again on the next cool lang (rust,kotlin etc) using nanoservices and some new per-column/second-pricing db.
Distributing data across the /tmp directories of many AWS lambda functions is the future of storage.
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
NYT isn't forcing these trackers into the user's browsers, ad banners are. You might say that's a distinction without a difference but I disagree, until you work with programmatic ad stuff it's difficult to fathom just how stupid it is, but also how unavoidable it is if you want to make money.
They could try a subscription model.
Glibness aside, there is probably more written about NYT's revenue from ads vs subscription than any other major media company.
IIRC they recently made more money from digital subs than they made from ads for the first time ever. But if they removed ads tomorrow it would still destroy the business as it currently operates.
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is really fascinating to me. Is this because engineers who they want to recruit dislike the New York Times brand, or because readers of the New York Times don't want to read things as informal as transparent blog posts about internal NYT decisions? It's very easy for me to see something like blog.newyorktimes.com with a similar design / community philosophy as Medium, but would that somehow cheapen the experienc…
I think you're over-thinking this. There isn't a huge crossover audience for engineer blog posts and general NYT audience, and I imagine the engineering blog posts do not go through the same editorial process content on nytimes.com does. That alone makes the case for using a different domain.
I'm being a cheeky detractor of NYT here. I think "candid, engineering-style blogposts" are the future of news, and ancient vehicles like New York Times are long dead. I think the "general NYT audience" is participating in #FakeNews, and they should radically reconsider their information diet.
As vivid example of this, compare James Birdle breaking the "Youtube exploitative kid videos" story way before, and in greater depth, than in any major publication. This is actually the future of news, and pretending like aging institutions like the New York Times are remotely relevant anymore is longshot wishful thinking.
Editorialization, fact-checking, and cultural leadership have important roles to play, and I'm excited to see these features unbundled into separate services. I'm long on services like Verrit and Snopes, and wish that I, as an independent publisher, could pay an intern to get official statements, cross-check narratives with history, and perform some of these functions. As is, I think people are operating under the delusion that ONLY NYT-style institutions can perform these functions, which baffles me.
(Actually, the future is probably more like James posting on jamesbridle.com, and then aggregating it through sites like Hacker News. But what do I know, I'm just a millennial who doesn't understand all these big partisan topics like modern journalism)
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
They can rewrite it again on the next cool lang (rust,kotlin etc) using nanoservices and some new per-column/second-pricing db.
Distributing data across the /tmp directories of many AWS lambda functions is the future of storage.
Wait...you can do that?
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#39> We found that some web customers were unable to access the puzzle, and found the cause of the problem to be App Engine’s limit on the size of outbound request headers (16KB). Users with a large amount of third-party cookies had their identity stripped from the proxied request. We made a quick fix to proxy only the headers and cookies we needed and we were back in action. That’s pretty funny. Users of NYT are sendin…
If the website is free then you are the product. Not sure why it’s a surprise these companies aim to maximize the value they can derive from their product (aka our data).
It's not free. NYT relies on a subscription model.
Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the website is free then you are the product. Not sure why it’s a surprise these companies aim to maximize the value they can derive from their product (aka our data).
It's not free. NYT relies on a subscription model.
The mini-crossword is free as well as some of their full crosswords.