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Scale Fail: Downtime Is Sexy

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Re: Scale Fail: Downtime Is Sexy

#2
I get the theory behind the talk and I find the idea funny. I find the talk condescending and not in the slightest funny. I find alot of 'traditional' developers miss the point and believe there being insulted and what they have been doing for a long time to be 'wrong' (in no way is it, its just not gospel) and get all protective and dismissive.

Re: Scale Fail: Downtime Is Sexy

#3
post #2

I get the theory behind the talk and I find the idea funny. I find the talk condescending and not in the slightest funny. I find alot of 'traditional' developers miss the point and believe there being insulted and what they have been doing for a long time to be 'wrong' (in no way is it, its just not gospel) and get all protective and dismissive.

Absolutely.

He's also totally missing the marketing/social point. When a service goes down, say twitter, the rest of the internet is deluged with complaints about the service not functioning.

It is immediately clear what the size and vociferousness of the service's user base is. So long as Twitter, or Tumblr, or whatever is usually up, their user base is going to grow on the news of their trials and tribulations.

"Twitter is so incredibly popular that it crashes their servers all the time!"

Unless you're actually a (good) app dev, people don't appreciate that Facebook and LinkedIn face the same scaling challenges that Twitter does.

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Second, the petulant tone of this video is really obnoxious. I also agree that his point is funny, and that the incentives are perverse, but i think he's setting up DHH and new tech as a straw man as well. It is certainly the case that chasing novelty has resulted in past lessons being forgotten, discarded and eventually reinvented, but that doesn't make everything that was done in the past correct.