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Medium's Technology Stack

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Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#41
post #22
post #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).

The point is that we don't really care about the number of uniques or page views. What we actually look at internally on a day to day basis is the amount of time people spend reading and other engagement metrics.

Whether someone spent a second or a year with the page open is irrelevent to how many servers you need to have running. How many pageviews or requests per second is. Aince this is an article about infrastructure no body cares about Engagement time.

Re: Medium's Technology Stack

#42
post #15

On this topic, I would like to get a book's recommendation on how to build a full stack product like this. Something more technical with war stories. My background: I'm a very strong iOS engineer with decent Python and JS skill. However my backend skill is limited at: building a Flask app with custom end points. It will talk to a single sql instance. I'm completely oblivious to memcache, load balancer, different AWS…

This is almost a self-parody of an overbuilt system. Be aware that a lot of stuff you'll read war stories on is hugely overdesigned, especially in the cloud, because it's basically like playing engineering legos.

When someone else is paying for it, it's a huge amount of fun. If you're paying for it yourself, eliminate as many layers of the 'stack' as you can get away with.

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