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As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

techcrunch.com

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

#81

Post by fookyong »

pavs wrote: post #64
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?

it's an attempt to control the PR message.

by doing this, they are laying the blame on one person so the media can stop hating Digg and start hating the ex-VP of Engineering who "killed Digg".

of course, whether he was actually responsible in some way is something we may never know. for all we know he may have been completely against releasing v4 but was vetoed by Rose et al. or on the other hand he may have overpromised and under-delivered, putting the company in jeopardy, in which case he deserves to be let go.

it's all speculation until we hear an official comment from either side.

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

#82

Post by code_duck »

pavs wrote: post #64
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?

The typical investor doesn't take the time to really understand the companies or technical issues, unfortunately. They see 'there was a problem, management fired the guy who was at fault' and are happy.

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

#83

Post by MartinCron »

hack_edu wrote: post #43
soofaloofa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digg isn't a startup. It started in 2004 and has been mature for about 5 years. They are a business now. And a big one at that.

These days, "startup" can mean pretty much anything smaller than a Fortune 500 company...

Being a startup isn't about the company, it's about the product. There are startup teams at fortune 500 companies. A startup company is a company with one new product in development.

Personally, I don't consider Digg a startup.

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

#84

Post by c00p3r »

soofaloofa wrote: post #21
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your post implies digg isn't a startup.

Digg isn't a startup. It started in 2004 and has been mature for about 5 years. They are a business now. And a big one at that.

So, why not just pay to Cassandra's authors for a quick fix? Because they can't?

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

#85

Post by _delirium »

squidsoup wrote: post #68
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?

Microsoft could be one example of a successful one. Their flagship Windows codebase that ran the 3.1->95->98->ME line was basically ditched with the rewrite-from-scratch NT (famously done by an ex-VMS team), which later had some APIs ported to it to make Windows 2000 and especially XP be close to drop-in replacements for the old line, while not really sharing much code. I think in retrospect that was probably a good idea: the NT rewrite put the codebase on much better footing than the aging, incrementally updated classic Windows codebase had been.

Solaris is another example of a rewrite that seems to have worked, though the rewrite did derive from a different set of existing code, not a total from-scratch job. But the classic SunOS 1.x.-4.x codebase was ditched, and SunOS 5.x / "Solaris 2" replaced it.

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

#86

Post by mmaunder »

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.

This is my all time favorite Spolsky blog entry. This lesson has saved me a few times. The broader lesson is that new and shiny in software isn't better and is often worse.

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

#87

Post by jshen »

sliverstorm wrote: post #25
cookiecaper wrote: post #14

Is there any reason that Cassandra is the focus of this article? It is really silly and irresponsible to peg a nascent project like that without any reasoning or sources. I'm sure something changed besides just a Cassandra rollout, and wasn't Digg using it on v3 too? I think Cassandra is pretty well tested. There have been lots of super-large-scale deployments. It just seems lame to blame it on that, but I guess mayb…

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

Reminds me of the way NASA blamed lisp back in the day

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

#88

Post by jshen »

fleitz wrote: post #44
megaman821 wrote: post #38

This article is a fine example of the poor logic that pisses me off nearly every day. Just because Digg v4, which heavily uses Cassandra, can't be used as a Cassandra success story does not automatically mean you can assume the opposite, that it is a Cassandra failure story. There is no indication why Digg has been down so often and there is really no conclusions to draw as of yet on the technology they use.

The article basically comes right out and says it. You just need to read between the lines a little bit. From the article: Quinn was the main champion of moving over to Cassandra, say our sources. Now the site is taking a huge hit, at least in the short term, because of that decision and/or how it was implemented, and Quinn is paying for it with his job. It's always a toss up between whether it was implemented correc…

I'm not sure I'd use tech crunch as a reliable source.

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

#89

Post by jshen »

josefresco wrote: post #66
blasdel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

User powered will always turn into lowest common denominator if the user base grows beyond a niche

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

#90

Post by bbatsell »

zzzeek wrote: post #59
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 .

> They are planning to transition to Cassandra as the primary database. do you have a source for that ? > it is used as a makeshift k-v store That is very true, they should switch. It just seemed like they had no plan to do so.

I could swear an admin said it with some pretty fair definitiveness; I thought I remembered that it was ketralnis, but this was the best I could find from him, and it's not nearly as definite as my memory says.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bcqhi/reddits_n...

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