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What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

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Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#41

Post by robryan »

benologist wrote: post #20
noahlt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhone, Android, and Mac clients. Maintaining as well as improving the web interface and the API. Lots more scaling - people check Twitter way more than they do Wordpress-hosted blogs. I'm sure there's more, this is just what came off the top of my head.

Wasn't their iPhone stuff a single guy who had a nice/leading client they bought last year?

That client would then touch a lot of other people though, even if it was primarily the one guy. Changes that are rolled out on the platform would need to be considered in terms of this app along with the all other platform apps.

Sure when independent a single guy can sit there and create something like that solo, inside Twitter though there would be a lot more process and interaction to achieve the goals.

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#42

Post by cletus »

ck2 wrote: post #4

How can over 100 people be needed for basically a scaled blog system that consists only of 140 character titles (not even any article content) and RSS feeds? It doesn't even have a search feature (past the previous week) or html, or tags, etc. Doesn't WordPress.com do it with like a dozen people and their system is way, way, way more complex? update: no, wait, in December 2010 they announced it's over 350 people now…

Well you need 100-200 engineers just to try and make Cassandra scale. The rest do the production site with more proven technologies.

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#43

Post by benologist »

zohebv wrote: post #33
benologist wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're an order of magnitude past their peak load - New Years Eve they set a new record of almost 7000/second. http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/01/06/new-years-eve-set-a... I don't believe Twitter is trivial, but I think they're perceived as more complex than they are - WordPress + Reddit + Heroku only have like 10% that number combined . Apples to oranges, but those 3 companies would be doing more everythings per…

Handling updates to 7000 user accounts per second isn't what makes it hard for twitter. It is the propagation of these updates to a gazillion followers that taxes the system. Their primary overhead is the messaging update to followers. Ashton Kutcher has 6 million followers. Sending instantaneous notifications to all those million twitter clients is what makes it a killer. TLDR; It is not the vertices in the twitter…

Unprecedented, except is it really unprecedented or are we just looking at it from the sexy social startup whatever must say graph and also disrupt angle, where everything is new and super hard and nobody has problems that have ever been solved before.

RSS strikes me as an almost identical process other than the time subscribers wait to check for new content, and there are feeds with millions of subscribers. So now the problem is reduced to doing it in a timely fashion.

This is why I wonder if they're really that immensely complicated - isn't Google doing much the same thing, and possibly even at a bigger scale at one point, with their reader and FeedBurner?

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#44

Post by robryan »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #2

Seems like kind of an overwhelming amount of attention.

Many people would muddle there way through things trying to work stuff out that would be easily explained to them. If no one has engaged the person to explain it to them, they will assume that they should just know it and be afraid to ask. This ensures everyone gets up to speed early, probably looks like a lot of time spent at the time but probably saves a lot of time down the track.

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#45

Post by Samuel_Michon »

benologist wrote: post #20
noahlt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhone, Android, and Mac clients. Maintaining as well as improving the web interface and the API. Lots more scaling - people check Twitter way more than they do Wordpress-hosted blogs. I'm sure there's more, this is just what came off the top of my head.

Wasn't their iPhone stuff a single guy who had a nice/leading client they bought last year?

Yup, Loren Brichter, who wrote Tweetie. Twitter bought his company, Atebits, and hired Loren to continue working on the iOS Twitter client.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweetie

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#46

Post by tzs »

benologist wrote: post #18
tzs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handling on average something like 76000 status updates per second (much higher when something interesting happens in the world), each of which must quickly become available to anywhere from 1 to a million clients. Wordpress.com is trivial compared to Twitter.

You're an order of magnitude past their peak load - New Years Eve they set a new record of almost 7000/second. http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/01/06/new-years-eve-set-a... I don't believe Twitter is trivial, but I think they're perceived as more complex than they are - WordPress + Reddit + Heroku only have like 10% that number combined . Apples to oranges, but those 3 companies would be doing more everythings per…

Yeah, the number I had was for total API calls (6 billion a day), not just updates. http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/17/twitter-seeing-6-billion-ap...

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#47

Post by tzs »

ck2 wrote: post #12
tzs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handling on average something like 76000 status updates per second (much higher when something interesting happens in the world), each of which must quickly become available to anywhere from 1 to a million clients. Wordpress.com is trivial compared to Twitter.

Yes but that's handled by hardware, not by people, and I am sure only a few critical coders handle the software performace. WordPress.com is not as trivial as you might think http://en.wordpress.com/stats/ Certainly it's just a matter of scaling once you hit a certain level of volume, you just have to be able to bring more servers online into the grid. Scaling from 10,000 users to 1 million is probably very hard. Sca…

The big difference between blog hosting and things like Twitter (or Reddit, or Digg, etc) is that blogs are independent, so adding servers scales you up linearly. When you are looking at X's blog, basically everything you see is coming from one server.

You will have to have something that deals with mapping URLs in the unified logical name space of your site to the individual servers that the particular blogs on--that's the part that you can't just throw machines at and get good results.

With the social sites, you can't isolate things easily, because what a given person sees at any time is drawn from an ever changing set of content from other users, with each viewer drawing from a different set.

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#48

Post by wh-uws »

ck2 wrote: post #17
scarmig wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora to the rescue: http://www.quora.com/Twitter-Inc-company/Why-does-Twitter-ne...

Wow, very nice find. I took a stab at the question via Google but gave up. I also discovered they have their own (but singular) datacenter: http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/room-to-grow-twitter-... But they are planning on adding more, which leads me to believe maybe that's what some of the new hires are for.

Wow, very nice find. I took a stab at the question via Google but gave up.

Exactly why quora is compelling. If you didn't know now you do

Re: What New Twitter Employees Do For The First Week

#50

Post by georgieporgie »

phaedrus wrote: post #14

My "new hire" treatment as government contractor was so bad I almost quit. Even though it's a huge organization there's no process at all in place; you're just thrown to the wolves. Basic things like where and how to get my security badge and car tags were not covered. I was not given any input about what was expected of me, but I found out about things I was supposed to do only when I was getting yelled at for not h…

I did some work for the government while in college. While I'm glad I did it, as it gave me a purpose and venue for my essentially self-taught advanced coding, I would never do it again.
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