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I seem to recall that, years ago, this article's photo[1] of Digg engineers sitting together for the v4 launch used to get posted every now and then. Usually, the idea was to shock people about how awful open offices were. Only today did I learn that this was a photo of an unusual event, and not how people usually sat at Digg. Or maybe I'm thinking of a different photo? [1] https://lethain.com/static/blog/heroes/digg…
> Our API server was a Python Tornado service... and one of the most frequently accessed endpoint was used to retrieve user by their name or id. Because it supported retrieval by either name or id, it set default values for both parameters as empty lists. This is a super reasonable thing to do! However, Python only initializes default parameters when the function is first evaluated, which means that the same list is…
Humans aren't perfect. Open source projects have missed unescaped spaces in directory paths that caused the deletion of /usr (Bumblebee), video games have forgotten to check the cwd and deleted vital windows boot files (Eve Online) and operating systems have forgotten to check passwords (MacOS). Given this was 2010 I wouldn't be surprised if they had a less mature development process that doesn't use things people ta…
Humans are good at designing processes and procedures that compensate for their lack of perfection. In this case that capability was not used apparently.
Anyone can make a mistake and that's fine, but a company would be expected to have processes and enough eyes to make sure that a bunch of other people need to make the same mistake before it makes its way into prod at which point the likelihood of mistake becomes really low...
Kevin Rose: We migrated from LAMP to Cassandra because LAMP doesn't scale and Cassandra does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNBcIPSROs
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hasn’t Facebook moved away from LAMP because of… scale? Given how many users they have I suppose they know a thing or two about scale.
Facebook made Cassandra specifically because of this. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshma...
Eventually most people remembered why SQL was so great, and they added Redis if they needed a cache. The Ruby people though still liked those NoSQL stuff, and I'll never understand them.
Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues. I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.
Was it the V4 rollout where basically every link came from MrBabyMan?
Digg's v4 release on August 25, 2010, was marred by site-wide bugs and glitches. Digg users reacted with hostile verbal opposition. Beyond the release, Digg faced problems due to so-called "power users" who would manipulate the article recommendation features to only support one another's postings, flooding the site with articles only from these users and making it impossible to have genuine content from non-power users appear on the front page.[citation needed] Frustrations with the system led to dwindling web traffic, exacerbated by heavy competition from Facebook, whose like buttons started to appear on websites next to Digg's.[19] High staff turnover included the departure of head of business development Matt Van Horn, shortly after v4's release.[20]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans aren't perfect. Open source projects have missed unescaped spaces in directory paths that caused the deletion of /usr (Bumblebee), video games have forgotten to check the cwd and deleted vital windows boot files (Eve Online) and operating systems have forgotten to check passwords (MacOS). Given this was 2010 I wouldn't be surprised if they had a less mature development process that doesn't use things people ta…
Completely disagree with the aproach humans are not perfect. This was not a one opportunity only event. Every test case they did not run, every load simulation they did not perform, every chaos test they decided to overlook was an example of humans failing repeatedly. Massive websites were running since the early nineties...And robust software practices are a thing of the sixties.
They bet it all on this v4 thing, and lost.
> Our API server was a Python Tornado service... and one of the most frequently accessed endpoint was used to retrieve user by their name or id. Because it supported retrieval by either name or id, it set default values for both parameters as empty lists. This is a super reasonable thing to do! However, Python only initializes default parameters when the function is first evaluated, which means that the same list is…
Humans aren't perfect. Open source projects have missed unescaped spaces in directory paths that caused the deletion of /usr (Bumblebee), video games have forgotten to check the cwd and deleted vital windows boot files (Eve Online) and operating systems have forgotten to check passwords (MacOS). Given this was 2010 I wouldn't be surprised if they had a less mature development process that doesn't use things people ta…
Around that time I was in the middle of the Java ecosystem though, which had tons of tooling for validation, linting, verification, books full of best practices, etc.
Still a far cry from what is normal these days, but we did do things like unit tests, end-to-end tests and code reviews back then. But, that was enterprise, the SF web companies I think weren't as enterprisey as the bank I worked for at the time.
It's ironic though; the old fashioned companies I've worked for adopted a lot of the more fast-and-loose-feeling practices from SF, think extreme programming, agile, taking a chance on rewriting the whole back-end to a new language, things like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still... did no one with even moderate Python experience even glance at this very important endpoint at any stage during those 4 weeks? Like I say, this is the kind of thing that jumps out of the screen for an experienced developer.
In 2010? You'd be surprised before widespread adoption of git at how many places the process was individual developers committing changes unsupervised. I'm not sure we even disagree that's the problem - you feel a second person should have looked at it, I feel the process should require that. A code review might be something that they'd sit down with a selected piece of code that they felt was risky on a biweekly bas…
Albeit unpopular opinion, this kind of things is one of the reasons why I'll always push for Java instead of a jigsaw of different languages that sound cool. Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly. Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple. Too…
Reddit, the clear winner of Diggs traffic was written in python. Guess Python might work just fine :\