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As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

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Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#61

Post by sliverstorm »

TheCondor wrote: post #57
sliverstorm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Placing all the blame on Cassandra helps Digg justify letting go the VP, since he was allegedly the guy who pushed it.

So what's the digg story here? I get that some VP suggested a new buzzwordy technology, they gave him enough rope to hang himself and he did and left the company with a broken pile of crap. It could happen, if you have a healthy company you give trust to people. That it got this far doesn't speak well of the rest of management. It doesn't speak really well of the rest of the team either. Shouldn't there have been som…

Never said I supported it. If my comment came across that way, I apologize.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#62

Post by pavs »

cookiecaper wrote: post #15
narrator wrote: post #12

Reddit runs on Cassandra + PostgreSQL. They use Cassandra as a key/value store and not as the primary database though.

They are planning to transition to Cassandra as the primary database. PostgreSQL is not used in a relational way on reddit -- it is used as a makeshift k-v store. You can take a look at this yourself as reddit is fully open-source: http://github.com/reddit .

According to reddit admins some of the recent downtimes in the last few months were due to cassandra and they were having some bad performance and stability issues. I can look it up if anyone is interested but it will be a bit of a work, since they stated it (several times) in the comment section and perhaps once on a blog post too.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#63

Post by pavs »

Devilboy wrote: post #60
potatolicious wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have questions about what they're doing with all that staff, especially now that it's become apparent that Reddit is doing similar (if not larger) numbers with a handful of guys (literally, countable on one hand). Evidently Digg is better at the monetization game than Reddit has been, so more sales staff I can understand... but devs?

I can understand that Digg needs more people than Reddit (even though their traffic numbers are about the same) but TEN TIMES more people? That's just not sensible. I'm sure Digg can make a nice profit without further growth if they just got rid of about half their staff.

I wonder if its easier to get funding (and later position yourself to get sold out), if you show that you have quite a few people working for you.

Personally I have no idea nor do I see any reason for that many people working for digg, but my understanding is that Digg (or rather Kevin Rose) has always been about having the perception of big without actually being that big.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#64

Post by pavs »

mcantelon wrote: post #34

Reddit went through similar issues a few months back (downtime, slowness, etc.), but they overcame these issues without turfing people. My guess is Digg pushed the engineering VP out to make the investors happy rather than to actually move forward.

How does it make investors happy? Why would investors care what kind of database you use?

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#65

Post by binspace »

amix wrote: post #31

Like Joel Spolsky said it: "They followed the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite everything from scratch" - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I think rewriting from scratch is the core of their problem and not really Cassandra. Gradually going over to Cassandra would have been a much better idea.

Yep, big bang rewrites are always scary. Doing something more incremental would have been safer.

One way to "safely" do a big-bang change would have been to use both architectures in parallel and sync back and forth. That way, if the new architecture fails, you still have the old one.

Of course, that is lots of effort, and restricts new features (which may be a good thing anyway).

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#66

Post by josefresco »

blasdel wrote: post #56
madridorama wrote: post #5

Digg turned into nothing but a paid distribution and SEO engine anyway

Digg was something else before?

Yeah originally it was Slashdot but better, more current and user powered (which was a new concept in the mid 2000's). What it turned into was a traffic generator for a small group of power users who fed the community the lowest common denominator of content.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#67

Post by jbellis »

pavs wrote: post #62
cookiecaper wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are planning to transition to Cassandra as the primary database. PostgreSQL is not used in a relational way on reddit -- it is used as a makeshift k-v store. You can take a look at this yourself as reddit is fully open-source: http://github.com/reddit .

According to reddit admins some of the recent downtimes in the last few months were due to cassandra and they were having some bad performance and stability issues. I can look it up if anyone is interested but it will be a bit of a work, since they stated it (several times) in the comment section and perhaps once on a blog post too.

The cassandra issues were primarily ops failures, and secondarily an older version of Cassandra making it difficult to recover once it was overwhelmed. (Some of the resulting improvements in Cassandra are documented here: http://www.riptano.com/blog/whats-new-cassandra-065)

Cassandra looks to be working fine for reddit now: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/08/everything-went-better-than-e...

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#68

Post by squidsoup »

amix wrote: post #31

Like Joel Spolsky said it: "They followed the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite everything from scratch" - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I think rewriting from scratch is the core of their problem and not really Cassandra. Gradually going over to Cassandra would have been a much better idea.

I've heard this time and time again, but what if your application is a genuine ball of mud? Would you really not advocate a rewrite for an unmaintainable spaghetti classic asp app still in production today?

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#69

Post by ojbyrne »

TheCondor wrote: post #57
sliverstorm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Placing all the blame on Cassandra helps Digg justify letting go the VP, since he was allegedly the guy who pushed it.

So what's the digg story here? I get that some VP suggested a new buzzwordy technology, they gave him enough rope to hang himself and he did and left the company with a broken pile of crap. It could happen, if you have a healthy company you give trust to people. That it got this far doesn't speak well of the rest of management. It doesn't speak really well of the rest of the team either. Shouldn't there have been som…

I'm sure the real story is different. My rough guess at it is

* the main marketing tool that digg has left is "Kevin Rose as genius"

* Kevin and the people he drinks with pushed for the adoption of new cool technology.

* the entire thing was a giant clusterfuck because of Kevin and the people he drinks with.

* but once that became obvious there was a need for a scapegoat so that digg could keep its primary marketing tool.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#70

Post by squidsoup »

pavs wrote: post #63
Devilboy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand that Digg needs more people than Reddit (even though their traffic numbers are about the same) but TEN TIMES more people? That's just not sensible. I'm sure Digg can make a nice profit without further growth if they just got rid of about half their staff.

I wonder if its easier to get funding (and later position yourself to get sold out), if you show that you have quite a few people working for you. Personally I have no idea nor do I see any reason for that many people working for digg, but my understanding is that Digg (or rather Kevin Rose) has always been about having the perception of big without actually being that big.

Fake it until you break it?
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