Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#111

Post by sofuture » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:05 PM UTC

sajidnizami wrote: post #107

rbanffy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stackoverflow has a tiny fraction of the traffic MySpace had when it was relevant. I bet it has a fraction of its traffic now.

StackOverflow's architecture these days is not just Microsoft stack. They are using Redis and whole load of other OSS tech to get things working. Here it is interesting to note that this is what they started with: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo... and this is what they are currently using http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an... I find it sad that these days MS is…

It is difficult to get Cache frameworks and other infrastructure working with MS Stack if you got a high performance website.

How so?

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#112

Post by blhack » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:09 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #66

jdavid wrote: post #30

I worked at MySpace on the MDP ( MySpace Developer Platform ) team. My team, MySpaceID, was the one that implemented Oauth 1, 2, 2.0a and all of the external REST libraries. We worked closely with the activity streams team and the OpenSocial Team. We also launched the MySpace JSL or MySpace Connect. We were the 1st to do a popup login flow for OpenID and several other cool things MySpace was doing to catch Facebook.…

Thanks for the insider account, nice to hear in a sea of speculation and rumor. One thing though, what do you mean when you say Facebook was 'Socratic to the core'? I'm only aware of that in context of the Socratic Method of teaching, but am not clear what it means here.

Glad I'm not the only one confused by that. I googled "define:socratic" and got "Know thyself"...

So I assume he meant that facebook knew exactly what they wanted to be, as opposed to myspace, who was trying to catch up with facebook.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#113

Post by rmason » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:11 PM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #75

benologist wrote: post #3

No, Facebook did. And they did it with crusty old PHP which pretty much proves the platform isn't going to make or break your business. Finding good talent that's experienced with huge scale sites is not going to be easy regardless of language. It's not like MySpace could have been RoR and suddenly everything would have been simple, at their prime they were doing a ridiculous amount of traffic that only a handful of…

> And they did it with crusty old PHP PHP is actually a good templating language and a passable rapid-prototyping language. The fact is that it's more important to stay agile when you're growing exponentially then to pick some optimal technology. PHP's simplicity makes it one of the best choices to be able to incrementally build a robust and scalable back-end underneath it as you go. ColdFusion and .NET I imagine to…

Sorry but I cannot resist. Don't comment on things you know nothing about.

Ever heard of JBOSS? Did you know they have an open source CFML project called Railo? Or that Chris Schalk, developer advocate, from Google called what another open source cfml distro called Open Blue Dragon was doing on the GAE as "awesome". He said it was the easiest way to get running on the GAE.

The best developers can do amazing things in a number of different languages.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#114

Post by gcb » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:16 PM UTC

now HN is just becoming /.

MS stack does not kill anyone. dumb management kills.

top level should be able to see the error and move, be it dumb layoffs or .net codebase. it's not like myspace was rocket science.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#115

Post by bad_user » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:16 PM UTC

sajidnizami wrote: post #59

kenjackson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too work with sites hitting high visitor count but I have to agree there with the article. Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed doesn't matter. I find this shocking and somewhat unbelievable. My wife, who isn't a tech person at all thinks that page load speed matters (she just called so I asked her) -- and sites gmail as an example of a page that takes too long to load (I think that "loading..."…

It does but I think you misunderstood the point. Most .Net developers are working on intranet sites. They don't have problem with large footprint pages. When they move to internet and public domain websites, they are newbies. It takes them a while to adjust to the way internet sites are written. SEO optimizations, CDN usage, Ajax calls etc are pretty important on internet site than on intranet site. Imagine using a U…

Well, that's why if you're looking for a business model, here's something that works -- take intranet applications people commonly use and release alternatives that do not suck so much.

Companies like 37signals are doing it successfully ;)

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#116

Post by famousactress » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:17 PM UTC

sofuture wrote: post #109

famousactress wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace. For the record, I think it's irrelevant.. but absolutely I think it's true. It doesn't mean .NET isn't capable, or that lots of .NET programmers aren't capable... Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web, and that the work that gets done at most…

Do you use .Net or are you familiar with the .Net community? Or are you basing your opinions on your lack of familiarity with it?

I worked professionally on .NET very early on it's in existence, for a couple of years. Before that I was a COM developer for a couple of years... since then I've done 8+ years in Java shops, and now I'm a full time python dev. Most of my career has been in the enterprise space. The last couple of years have been in web.

Most of my familiarity with the .NET community comes from the fact that I live/work in San Diego, and in the Healthcare IT space... if the combination of which don't make up the largest percentage of .NET developers in a particular area and arena, it must be close :)

So most of my experience with the .NET community comes from knowing developers and working with .NET-turned-Java folks... It's true, I haven't done .NET in a very long time. That said, I made the same assertion (to a slightly lesser extent) about the Java Enterprise camp.. and I've got loads of experience with that :)

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#117

Post by sapper2 » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:24 PM UTC

I agree. That is why eBay is such a failure ;-)

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#118

Post by rosenjon » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:26 PM UTC

The technology never kills the business; it's ALWAYS the people. However, I think this points out the extreme importance of getting good people who make good technology choices.

MSFT products are not inherently evil; they have some advantages for some types of projects. But a proprietary closed source stack always puts you at a disadvantage.

Worst case scenario with open source, you go patch what's holding you back in the open source. With bugs in MSFT products, you are at the mercy of MSFT to prioritize your issue. If you are a big enough fish, then they will pay attention. Otherwise, good luck.

I don't understand why anyone would willingly tie themselves to the Microsoft web dev stack as a startup. Even if you don't have to pay upfront, you will pay dearly in the future when you go to scale. At one startup I worked for we were hamstrung by not being able to afford the upgrade to Enterprise SQL Server, for example. So our data replication was tedious, time consuming and prone to failure.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#119

Post by jdavid » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:32 PM UTC

n_are_q wrote: post #103

jdavid wrote: post #30

I worked at MySpace on the MDP ( MySpace Developer Platform ) team. My team, MySpaceID, was the one that implemented Oauth 1, 2, 2.0a and all of the external REST libraries. We worked closely with the activity streams team and the OpenSocial Team. We also launched the MySpace JSL or MySpace Connect. We were the 1st to do a popup login flow for OpenID and several other cool things MySpace was doing to catch Facebook.…

Hey David :) (i'm remaining anon, just because). In fact devs always got two monitors and it was pretty easy to get more if you wanted to, but yea they were just 1280x1024's. I really don't think the dev hardware was much of an issue though, they did upgrade it fairly regularly. The testing and staging environments definitely existed. There were some deeper issues with some portions of the production infrastructure n…

This was a stark contrast from having worked at hi5 just prior where I had a killer Macbook Pro, and (2) 1080p 22" displays. Sometimes while visiting dropboxes offices in those days I remember them having (2-4) 27" displays. Just a difference between SV and LA.

At hi5 I remember some nights working till 5am in the morning going home, and then being at work by 10am for a meeting.

At MySpace I tried to get a few people together on weekends to hack on cool demos, but management didn't want people to burn out. They did however buy a few people blackberries and expect them to remote in and fix anything that might be a fire. A few of our team members had them and they would have to log in a 2am and fix shit.

I am still very proud of the work I did there and respect every one of my team mates as fantastic developers. I hope to work again one day with many of them.

If there was one place MySpace didn't fail it was hiring great talent, and bringing them to LA to work. The partying in LA might have been a bit of a distraction but, it's also what made LA a ton of fun. It was so easy to date down there vs. SF where it's impossible to meet a gal.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#120

Post by chollida1 » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:34 PM UTC

strlen wrote: post #104

chollida1 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Contrast this with Facebook, Google et al-- where every process (from corporate IT to production operations to HR and recruiting) is designed with needs of the engineering organization in mind: Completely agree. > Want ssh access to production? No problem. This makes me a little uneasy, I'm not sure everyone should have ssh access to the production server.

> This makes me a little uneasy, I'm not sure everyone should have ssh access to the production server. Every _developer_ should. No question about it. Sudo should given on an is-needed basis, but ultimately, as a developer I can screw up a lot more by simply writing bad code. Simple philosophy: you build the software, you should be involved in running it (including carrying a pager). Amazon's CTO agrees: http://twit…

> Every _developer_ should. No question about it. Sudo should given on an is-needed basis, but ultimately, as a developer I can screw up a lot more by simply writing bad code.

Fair enough.

This, more nuanced point, I agree with.