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As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

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Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#41

Post by bryanh »

dawie wrote: post #35
gaiusparx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other problem is they have been hyping V4 for a long time by making beta testing invite only and hard to get. It would have been better if they can have a public V4 beta running in parallel with V3 since it is a rewrite.

Even better: Have a link that says: "Try the new Beta" at the top like gmail and google docs, with a "Go back to Old Version". Implementing this should not be to hard and it allows them to get some feedback.

As a developer myself, I love hearing:

> Implementing this should not be to hard...

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#42

Post by mikeryan »

cookiecaper wrote: post #14

Is there any reason that Cassandra is the focus of this article? It is really silly and irresponsible to peg a nascent project like that without any reasoning or sources. I'm sure something changed besides just a Cassandra rollout, and wasn't Digg using it on v3 too? I think Cassandra is pretty well tested. There have been lots of super-large-scale deployments. It just seems lame to blame it on that, but I guess mayb…

So if you watch the Revision3 video where they talk about the stability issues Kevin throws Cassandra out there nothing really specific but when discussing downtime its the only technical factor he mentions.

He calls it "still beta software" and states they were fixing bugs in Cassandra during the days leading up to the release of v4.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#43

Post by hack_edu »

soofaloofa wrote: post #21
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your post implies digg isn't a startup.

Digg isn't a startup. It started in 2004 and has been mature for about 5 years. They are a business now. And a big one at that.

These days, "startup" can mean pretty much anything smaller than a Fortune 500 company...

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#44

Post by fleitz »

megaman821 wrote: post #38

This article is a fine example of the poor logic that pisses me off nearly every day. Just because Digg v4, which heavily uses Cassandra, can't be used as a Cassandra success story does not automatically mean you can assume the opposite, that it is a Cassandra failure story. There is no indication why Digg has been down so often and there is really no conclusions to draw as of yet on the technology they use.

The article basically comes right out and says it. You just need to read between the lines a little bit.

From the article: Quinn was the main champion of moving over to Cassandra, say our sources. Now the site is taking a huge hit, at least in the short term, because of that decision and/or how it was implemented, and Quinn is paying for it with his job.

It's always a toss up between whether it was implemented correctly or not. The correct course of action of course would have been to slowly move the site over to the new technology piece by piece rather than a wholesale switchover. The risk is in the migration strategy not the technology picked. They could have been equally stupid switching over to a new architecture with mysql.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#45

Post by zephjc »

Digg v4 has added back the features I liked after taking them away - mostly the Upcoming section, which tends to have interesting things that never make it to the front page, and the setting that allows you to default to Top Mews, instead of things I have already read ('My News').

For most users, change in features is what drove them away, not necessarily the spotty QOS (though that was pretty bad for a while).

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#46

Post by Silhouette »

soofaloofa wrote: post #21
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your post implies digg isn't a startup.

Digg isn't a startup. It started in 2004 and has been mature for about 5 years. They are a business now. And a big one at that.

That depends on how you define your terms. I'm not sure a company that has been around 6 years and has ~100 staff can be called a startup any more. On the other hand, I'm not sure a company that still survives more on the wishful thinking of investors than on the money it brings in after 6 years can be called a business, either, and certainly I wouldn't call it either big or mature. I'm honestly not sure what I would call that sort of organisation, though if I were an investor, I suspect the word "liability" would feature somewhere.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#47

Post by pilif »

dawie wrote: post #35
gaiusparx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other problem is they have been hyping V4 for a long time by making beta testing invite only and hard to get. It would have been better if they can have a public V4 beta running in parallel with V3 since it is a rewrite.

Even better: Have a link that says: "Try the new Beta" at the top like gmail and google docs, with a "Go back to Old Version". Implementing this should not be to hard and it allows them to get some feedback.

Considering the completely different backends of v3 and v4, I think, this would have been incredibly hard to implement. At least if changes in one system should end up in the other.

In this case you would not just have to write scrips to one-time migrate all needed data from v3 mysql to v4 Cassandra.

No. You would have to build a mechanism that doesn't just do it in both directions, it would also have to work at near-realtime speed.

If you then need consistency of the transferred data, this quickly gets impossible. Try finding a way to ensure consistency between these two completely different architectures.

In the end, most of v3 would have needed to be rewritten for a parallel use to be possible, at which point you don't really gain much.

"not hard to implement" - sigh

Disclaimer: I don't work at digg and I don't know more about their backend than the rest of the public. I did however just get around doing something like what you describe and there it wad "just" a different schema on the same database backend and even just that would have been hell

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#48

Post by blantonl »

gaiusparx wrote: post #33
amix wrote: post #31

Like Joel Spolsky said it: "They followed the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite everything from scratch" - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I think rewriting from scratch is the core of their problem and not really Cassandra. Gradually going over to Cassandra would have been a much better idea.

The other problem is they have been hyping V4 for a long time by making beta testing invite only and hard to get. It would have been better if they can have a public V4 beta running in parallel with V3 since it is a rewrite.

you can't do a parallel beta test of two functionally different sites. You would end up with two separate data stores, workflows, and ultimately a confused user base.

Never mind the fact that the user base is confused by the rollout.

And never mind the fact that Google has forever damaged the term "Beta" in the minds of general Web consumers.

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#49

Post by potatolicious »

points wrote: post #23
soofaloofa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digg isn't a startup. It started in 2004 and has been mature for about 5 years. They are a business now. And a big one at that.

For the 40m investment, I wonder how much profit they make. They seem to have a very large staff.

I have questions about what they're doing with all that staff, especially now that it's become apparent that Reddit is doing similar (if not larger) numbers with a handful of guys (literally, countable on one hand).

Evidently Digg is better at the monetization game than Reddit has been, so more sales staff I can understand... but devs?

Re: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door

#50

Post by plnewman »

amix wrote: post #31

Like Joel Spolsky said it: "They followed the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite everything from scratch" - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I think rewriting from scratch is the core of their problem and not really Cassandra. Gradually going over to Cassandra would have been a much better idea.

Actually if you google "digg cassandra" you'll get a number of blog posts dating back to 2009, describing different things they use Cassandra for.
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