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Medium's Technology Stack

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Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#3
> The Stack That Helped Medium Drive 2.6 Millennia of Reading Time

> For a site as seemingly simple as Medium, it may be surprising how much complexity is behind the scenes. It’s just a blog, right? You could probably knock something out using Rails in a couple of days. :)

> In past lives I’ve raced snowboards, jumped out of planes, and lived in the jungle.

Looking past the annoying, "look how cool we are" tone, I do appreciate their sharing what they use.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#4
2.6 Millennia of "reading time".

I just love these made-up PR metrics that can make any audience look big or any business seem successful.

Really, if you write a post about infrastructure you shouldn't have a metric that say absolutely nothing about your site's load. 25 millions unique readers per month is more fitting, but still quite lacking (too big a timeframe and no way to infer how many pageviews there are).

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#7
post #6
post #5

TLDR; nodejs and Go on the backend , with DynamoDB clojure on the front end with their own SPA framework.

Closure[1], not Clojure. [1] https://developers.google.com/closure/library/?hl=en

The one that has an O'reilly book with a bird on it?

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920001416.do

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920013754.do

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#8
There're a lot of sour grapes in this thread about performance and made up metrics, but let's take them at their word:

For a site as seemingly simple as Medium, it may be surprising how much complexity is behind the scenes. It’s just a blog, right? You could probably knock something out using Rails in a couple of days. :)

This hints that there is a lot more functionality being put up behind the scenes in terms of datamining and analysis and whatnot than is apparent from the simple "display an article", which indeed is a trivial Sinatra or Express (not even Rails!) app.

If you're not the customer, etc. etc.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#9

There're a lot of sour grapes in this thread about performance and made up metrics, but let's take them at their word: For a site as seemingly simple as Medium, it may be surprising how much complexity is behind the scenes. It’s just a blog, right? You could probably knock something out using Rails in a couple of days. :) This hints that there is a lot more functionality being put up behind the scenes in terms of dat…

While I agree with the overall thrust of your comment -- that playing armchair architect is sort of proving the author's point -- the post doesn't really even attempt to dispel the notion that their stack is overkill. And, honestly, to me, that would make for the more informative and interesting article -- don't just tell me the package you use for bloom filters, tell me why you need a network daemon for bloom filters!

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#10
I hope this doesn't come off as negative, I'm honestly curious: Why are there so many Medium stories on HN? There seems to be at least one story a day on the front page if not more. They usually have very few comments and the content often seems a little bit of a mismatch from what normally gets on the front page.

I'm happy to ignore the stories and skip over them but to me that's not the point. Is someone gaming the system? Is Medium a HN subsidiary of some sort? Has anyone done an analysis of how these types of stories get onto HN in the first place? Are Medium stories really that interesting that there's at least one Medium story worth posting on the front page of HN a day?

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