Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Rod's posts Post Back to profile
Top-level
Joe And-A-Half Men

@hu_logic @rodhilton I once suggested a rewrite to a prospective employer as a naive junior dev. I did not get the job.

Although in my defense, I actually had very valid reasons for a rewrite, and a well documented plan of attack for executing it.

The old system required employing thousands of people to manually copy inventory data from the in-store instances onto a shared database, rather than use automated APIs like at my last job. The old system was completely proprietary and was essentially held together with duct tape.

25 Dec 2022 at 15:34 | Wall-to-wall | Open on kolektiva.social
3 comments
Paula

@joehalfmen @hu_logic @rodhilton he would have you believe that this is the case for Twitter as well. Comparing it to a Rube Goldberg machine, and how “disconnecting one of the sensitive server racks” didn’t stop it from working

25 Dec 2022 at 16:33 | Open on hachyderm.io
Joe And-A-Half Men

@quoll @hu_logic @rodhilton the difference is that Twitter was built by teams of competent engineers who followed best practices by implementing proper workflows and code reviews. I don't doubt that it's a complex system, but that's not the same thing as "bad".

The company I was interviewing for was a half-digitized furniture company that was losing millions every month from their simple failure to automate their inventory management. They kept always hiring the cheapest devs, so their code quality was shit and they had absolutely no formalized internal workflows.

I do recognize I made a mistake by pitching a rewrite however. I should have sold them on splitting my time between maintaining the broken system and white boarding a new one over the course of 6 months, rather than spend the interview describeing all the ways their system needed to be replaced.

@quoll @hu_logic @rodhilton the difference is that Twitter was built by teams of competent engineers who followed best practices by implementing proper workflows and code reviews. I don't doubt that it's a complex system, but that's not the same thing as "bad".

The company I was interviewing for was a half-digitized furniture company that was losing millions every month from their simple failure to automate their inventory management. They kept always hiring the cheapest devs, so their code quality...

25 Dec 2022 at 16:47 | Open on kolektiva.social
Lt.Cpl Хуёвый Пчеловод

@joehalfmen @quoll @rodhilton Complexity is a matter of perspective - distributed 10TB database is "complex" to a front-end engineer, but it's relatively boilerplate to a principal data architect.

Same thing with Twitter - it's a highly-tuned high-volume distributed system. It's "complex" to someone who doesn't know what they're looking at, like Musk.

But it's a relatively standard architecture to those who actually work in this space.

Old, but good read:

blog.twitter.com/engineering/e

@joehalfmen @quoll @rodhilton Complexity is a matter of perspective - distributed 10TB database is "complex" to a front-end engineer, but it's relatively boilerplate to a principal data architect.

Same thing with Twitter - it's a highly-tuned high-volume distributed system. It's "complex" to someone who doesn't know what they're looking at, like Musk.

25 Dec 2022 at 17:19 | Open on mastodon.social
Go Up