I Broke Justin.tv
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I Broke Justin.tv
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: I Broke Justin.tv
#2Really good article. Purpose of article is to motivate talented people to join Justin.tv and I think it does that very well. First thing I did after reading, was to look for the available positions and actually found one that excited me.
Didn't apply though. Why you might ask.
Although article promotes the "doing" more than "doing absolutely right and best way". Job description is asking for more of "doing right and best way" than "getting it done". And I don't blame them for it, as they have successful product and they would like to keep it that way. What better of doing that than hiring best of the best.
For now, I am just going to wait and work on improving my skills to that point.
Re: I Broke Justin.tv
#3Finally, a few months into the job, I wrote “break” where I meant “continue,” and caused our payments servers to shutdown one-by-one over the course of several weeks.
So, they don't write tests at justin.tv, and they don't do automatic deployment? Sounds like a great place to work at...
Re: I Broke Justin.tv
#4Finally, a few months into the job, I wrote “break” where I meant “continue,” and caused our payments servers to shutdown one-by-one over the course of several weeks. So, they don't write tests at justin.tv, and they don't do automatic deployment? Sounds like a great place to work at...
Things are not quite as wild-west at Justin.tv as they once were. We now have QA (Thanks B!), monitoring and deploy management.
I think most small teams start with minimal qa and testing (not the recommended approach) and thus things like this happen often. Rapid development becomes blitzkrieg.
Re: I Broke Justin.tv
#5Finally, a few months into the job, I wrote “break” where I meant “continue,” and caused our payments servers to shutdown one-by-one over the course of several weeks. So, they don't write tests at justin.tv, and they don't do automatic deployment? Sounds like a great place to work at...
That's what caught my eye too. I like how it's soon followed by "Pushing code fast and often does have a cost, but the benefit in productivity is well worth it." That's certainly true if it's mostly _tested_ code, but there is nothing productive about spending a day trying to find and fix a bug like this in production. Been there, done that.
I'm trying to bootstrap a startup now, and if it fails to gain traction then justin.tv would be one of the first places I'd interview. (Hey, I like watching competitive TF2, and they provide a hell of a platform for casts, can I say.) Now I know this blog post was sort of written for the purposes of recruitment, but it's sort of making me think twice about whether I'd want to interview there. Bleh.
Re: I Broke Justin.tv
#6I would like to see how many happy OSX users are on Justin tv. It feels like they didn't test for usability at all. I asked them how it could be possible to code a player that is capable of playing HD flash at 1fps. Yes - 1 f p s, whereas other sites can play it fluidly(1). It's as if breaking stuff is their motto and answering user questions on how to solve it or explain why it happens is not.
Overall, their product is good enough to make me pay for a stream or two. But, as a user used to free video, that eventually pays for yours and you can't deliver, - ouch.
edit: (1)
Downvotes, pfft . What a joke.
Re: I Broke Justin.tv
#7Finally, a few months into the job, I wrote “break” where I meant “continue,” and caused our payments servers to shutdown one-by-one over the course of several weeks. So, they don't write tests at justin.tv, and they don't do automatic deployment? Sounds like a great place to work at...
There seems to be a general assumption that writing [unit?] tests is always the "right thing" to do, even at a startup, and no matter what the code in question does. In my experience that's absolutely not the case.
Re: I Broke Justin.tv
#8I would like to see how many happy OSX users are on Justin tv. It feels like they didn't test for usability at all. I asked them how it could be possible to code a player that is capable of playing HD flash at 1fps. Yes - 1 f p s, whereas other sites can play it fluidly(1). It's as if breaking stuff is their motto and answering user questions on how to solve it or explain why it happens is not. Overall, their product…
You're assuming that they actually have real control over player performance on your particular hardware setup, when in fact they have almost no control over it. Go ask Adobe and Apple why flash video (especially anything that isn't h.264) playback occasionally (definitely if you're talking about pre-10.6) sucks on OS X.
Re: I Broke Justin.tv
#9I would like to see how many happy OSX users are on Justin tv. It feels like they didn't test for usability at all. I asked them how it could be possible to code a player that is capable of playing HD flash at 1fps. Yes - 1 f p s, whereas other sites can play it fluidly(1). It's as if breaking stuff is their motto and answering user questions on how to solve it or explain why it happens is not. Overall, their product…
We use almost 100% OSX at the office (with smatterings of Ubuntu) so I have to say: yes, we have a lot of happy OSX users. If anything it's the IE users on Windows who should be annoyed.
I watch from home on my macbook air constantly and from work on an old mac mini, so I don't think it's a general OSX issue. What kind of hardware are you on? Which OS version?
Re: I Broke Justin.tv
#10Cool to learn that a bigger site tosses programmers into the ring from the start. What's even better is that they don't have meltdowns over mistakes and make sure every event is a chance to learn and improve rather than be concerned about losing one's job. There should be more of this in the dev community. I think I'd be much more comfortable in an environment like this where I'm being challenged as opposed to spending 3-6 months working under someone else and only half getting it. It may have some implications on their business, but they're confident enough to figure out a fix so more power to them.