Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#121

Post by cabalamat » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:38 PM UTC

dandelany wrote: post #27

".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace." This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's…

> "The biggest problem was they didn't allow the developers to have staging or testing servers -- they deployed on the production servers on the first go-around... And all this with no change management or control. No versioning either."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't want your software project managed by non-programmers. Any competent programmer would know not to do that.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#122

Post by lancebailey » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:38 PM UTC

I think it had absolutely nothing to do with the technology, but more of the execution. The thing that got me to use facebook is that when I search for some one I knew in high school or from a long time ago. facebook was a tone more accurate then myspace, and the suggested friends algorithm was batter as well. I personally believe that if myspace would have spent more time reinventing themselves early (2004,2005) then maybe they still would be relevant. But when you are as big as they where complacency as a way off taking over.

Beside twitter isn't using .net and we all know the troubles they had scaling.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#123

Post by flyt » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:40 PM UTC

chollida1 wrote: post #99

strlen wrote: post #31

Platform fetishism[1] and attempts to throw developers under the bus[2] aside, the comment from Nick Kwiatkowski states a much better reason: developers weren't empowered do their jobs. The comments state that there was no staging or test environment, no ability to roll back releases, refactoring was a dirty word (engineers wanted to refactor, but couldn't), principal on technical debt was never paid (only the intere…

> 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.

If you can't trust engineers to work in production, then you can't trust their code. Extensive logging, auditing, and granular access control are also critical to making this work in a large engineering org.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#124

Post by guelo » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:41 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #55

strlen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh wow. Wow. I hereby revoke my previous statement. These are some God-awful infrastructure decisions. Version control and a staging server are the most basic necessities for a scalable dev project. I even set them up when I'm working on a personal project, alone. Exactly. This seems to follow the Kevin Rose formula: make horrible decisions (or be entirely absent from decision making) without any understanding of t…

> prior to Facebook, P in LAMP also stood for Perl The P in LAMP has been associated with PHP for much longer than the existence of Facebook.

I think I remember around 2005 being surprised at hearing PHP stand in for the P, before that it had always been Perl. Though it probably had to do with the circles you ran in.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#125

Post by clutchski » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:47 PM UTC

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.…

"Fox was a closed source company"

Wow. I didn't know such a thing existed. Was no open source software used? From databases to javascript libraries?

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#126

Post by PonyGumbo » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:48 PM UTC

lemmsjid wrote: post #100

As someone who was fairly intimately involved in the entire evolution of the MySpace stack, I'm dumbfounded at the number of inaccuracies in this article (actually, it's hard to call them inaccuracies so much as an exercise in "I'm going to write an article based on some stuff I heard from disgruntled people."). I developed in non-Microsoft technologies before and after MySpace, and I can tell you that, like all tech…

Thank you for sharing - this is the most interesting comment (to me, anyway) so far.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#127

Post by nikcub » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:48 PM UTC

famousactress wrote: post #45

dandelany wrote: post #27

".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace." This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's…

.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…

> Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web

It is a fallacy to think that the web is the only large network that requires scale.

Goldman Sachs alone stores more data than the entire web

The Visa network has had 4 seconds of downtime in decades

Most airline systems took decades to engineer

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#128

Post by prostoalex » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 9:54 PM UTC

silverlake wrote: post #62

chaz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendster: http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-l... VB: Can you tell me a bit about what you learned in your time at Friendster? JS: For me, it basically came down to failed execution on the technology side — we had millions of Friendster members begging us to get the site working faster so they could log in and spend hours social networking with their friends. I remember coming in to the offi…

From http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15frien... But the board also lost sight of the task at hand, according to Kent Lindstrom, an early investor in Friendster and one of its first employees. As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed Web site became slower. Things would become so bad that a Friendster Web page took as long as 40 seconds to download. Yet, from where Mr. Lindstrom sat, tec…

It's unclear why that should be a board-level discussion in the first place. I doubt board meetings at Amazon or Google involve people benchmarking performance.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#129

Post by awsmine » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 10:11 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #63

sbov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they mean like that. If something is obviously slow its a problem regardless. However, especially when you have a certain number of users, even a fraction of a second faster load time can have a visible change in your analytics. I've read before that Facebook has shown that users tend to spend a fixed amount of time on their site. Once users hit that time limit, they're done. If your site exhibits simil…

That information about fixed time usage is interesting. But even with that aside, doesn't everyone know that fraction of a second decreases in load time is important for high volume sites? For example, MySpace was getting at one point 24 billion page views per month. If you could reduce each page view by 1/100th of a second you save 40 weeks per month for your users (assuming the model where they look at a fixed numb…

* you save 40 weeks per month for your users*

that sounds big and important, but it doesnt really mean much does it?

the difference between a 1/100th of a second and 2/100th's of a second is too small to translate to enough time to get any increase in productivity.

There must be someother reason that load time is that crucial.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#130

Post by MartinCron » Fri, Mar 25, 2011, 10:27 PM UTC

smokinn wrote: post #80

sjs wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of Fish served 2m pageviews / hour with one server. http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/aspnet-and-iis-...

Don't put too much faith in what Markus says. He lies about everything. Constantly. I think he thinks it's a strategic advantage to understate the work and resources he's invested into pof. (Makes for a good marketing story and newbies think building a pof clone is easy so they waste lots of money trying.) Right about the time that blog post was written peer1 had a marketing video on their site where there was a guy…

POF uses a CDN, which runs on multiple servers, nobody has ever claimed otherwise. The claim (that I haven't seen disproven) is that it's one one application or one database server.