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Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

chess.com

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Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#41

Post by randmeerkat »

fbdab103 wrote: post #38
randmeerkat wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals. Maybe now we can get rid of Byzantine tech interview processes and instead just focus on hiring people that are capable of hacking things together.

>..focus on hiring people that are capable of hacking things together. Based on my daily frustrations with basically every piece of software, that already appears to be the status quo.

> Based on my daily frustrations with basically every piece of software, that already appears to be the status quo.

That’s the kind of elitist thinking that leads to Byzantine tech interviews and poor collaboration.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#42

Post by sebastiansm »

cosentiyes wrote: post #8
TurkishPoptart wrote: post #7

Lichess.org does everything Chess.com does but more, without needing to pay.

lichess.org >>> chess.com. I encourage everyone who can afford to donate to do so!

Feature wise I agree with you, lichess is amazing. Chess.com funds a lot of tounaments that make the chess scene a lot more fun and interesting, lichess cant't do that.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#43

Post by rr888 »

tester457 wrote: post #25
slm_HN wrote: post #18

Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr. However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org. They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, whic…

Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.

Surely the most important fundamental is that it makes money?

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#44

Post by nicky0 »

slm_HN wrote: post #18

Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr. However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org. They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, whic…

“run by people who aren’t good at Chess” - what an odd statement to make.

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#45

Post by jacobsenscott »

czx4f4bd wrote: post #15
pkolaczk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they even use Scala? I thought they were using Java (but I may have outdated knowledge). Lichess is written in Scala. Do you have any pointer to an article describing chess.com tech stack?

The listings on https://www.chess.com/jobs provide some hints. Some mentions of PHP and Java for the backend, Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis, MySQL, Mongo, AWS, and GCP, among other things.

Did someone say resume driven development?

Re: Chess is booming and our servers are struggling

#48

Post by owlglass »

nwienert wrote: post #36
tester457 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.

The game reviews are really nice to quickly see the key points of the game. Plus the UI all over is better than Lichess. That and network effects explain the rest.

I'm curious, as someone who appreciates the simple and intuitive Lichess UI, what makes the Chess.com UI better than Lichess'?
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