Gluttonous: TechCrunch's Twitter Article Translated from Arrington-Speak

TechCrunch's Twitter Article Translated from Arrington-Speak

kev — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:19:00 -0400

With apologies to Gruber.

Original text from TechCrunch.

It doesn’t really matter if Twitter’s Chief Architect Blaine Cook was fired or resigned. The important thing is that he’s gone now, and this gives Twitter the opportunity to hire someone (or a team) who may actually be able to scale the nearly two year old service and keep it live.

I haven’t done any research or spoken to anyone about it, so don’t ask, but I have found a scapegoat.

Cook was directly responsible for scaling Twitter, and he very much failed in his job.

Twitter is down sometimes, and I’m angry about it.

A year ago he spoke at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference about scaling Rails applications. His presentation suggested Twitter’s problems were behind them, but in fact some of their biggest stumbles hadn’t occurred yet. Note in particular slide 9 of that presentation, where Cook says about scaling Rails apps like Twitter: “It’s Easy. Really.”

I found a posted slide from a public conference during my “investigative reporting phase. Oh, and Twitter is on Rails, and I can blame Rails. It’s Easy. Really.

Whether Twitter’s woes were all on Cook’s shoulders or not, he should not have been boasting about solving the problem last year.

I’m high as a kite.

Meanwhile, Twitter has made at least three key hires this year on the technical side. Lee Mighdoll joined as VP Engineering and Operations in January. And this week they hired two scaling experts - John Kalucki and Steve Jenson (”known for his work scaling Blogger and Blogspot”).

And they hired someone, yada yada yada, sprinkle random facts in so nobody notices my complete incompetence. Perfect!

"TechCrunch's Twitter Article Translated from Arrington-Speak" by Kevin Clark

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:53:20 -0400

@Finanzamt: I’d say it entirely depends on what kind of app you’re building, and what the bottlenecks are. Scaling in general can be a hard problem, or can be fairly straightforward. I don’t think Rails in particular changes that.

"TechCrunch's Twitter Article Translated from Arrington-Speak" by Finanzamt

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:35:44 -0400

Is scalling in rails apps is really easy? I dont think so.

"TechCrunch's Twitter Article Translated from Arrington-Speak" by Ben

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:27:37 -0400

Couldn’t agree with you more. Nice to see someone taking a shot at the ‘great Michael Arrington’ perched so high up on his friggin pedestal.

As a developer, it irks me to see one person making so much money out of just talking about the hard work that everyone else is doing…

"TechCrunch's Twitter Article Translated from Arrington-Speak" by Richard

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:02:47 -0400

Very well done. Agree a 100%.

It’s just bad form to slag someone off in that sort of way, regardless of the (non-existent) research involved.