Oh my lord
I feel like I’m listening to an argument between Markov chainers
“If views were in the same database as likes it would be easy”
…wow, Twitter uses three whole datacenters. This makes it more complex than Elno is comfortable with
Plus two cloud providers!
“25% of the cpus are running the ads model, which is the smallest model. 75% of the work is serdes” you must be new here
“I feel like I’m stuck in a Douglas Adams novel” yes but not the one you just mentioned
God I can hardly tell these guy’s voices apart. At least Elno’s South African accent is mildly differentiating
“Features which should be easy to add because the stack complexity is extremely complex.” Well you were just confused by the existence of an analytics database separate from a product database
REWRITE! DRINK!!
(Somebody convince Elno to rewrite in Rust lol)
“Rolling out a complete rewrite without downtime seems hard” yes! Yes it is!
This is the first time Elno has ever encountered a SaaS company
“If 80% of your workforce happens to leave” mentions a questioner, entirely eliding whose responsibility that was
“There’s so much custom stuff that understanding it takes a couple weeks. You’d need at least a month to be productive.” I… yes. Welcome to software.
These guys are really fixated on being able to run Twitter locally when that’s entirely an anti pattern at good co’s”
“You touch one thing and it affects seventeen extra services” yes Elno welcome to software
He wants to add view counts to tweets “which will really make the site pop”
“Today timeline mixer was deprecated for home mixer. But was it deleted? No! Now we’re running both” “well it doesn’t make much sense to deprecate something if you don’t delete it”
This is literally this guy’s first large software project.
“This is possibly the largest amount if change in the shortest amount of time of any acquisition in history”
(These quotes are a mix of Elno and people who appear to be outside engineers he brought in who are venting. Oh, one of them is Geohot.)
He’s talking some business bullshit now, LAAAAAAME, bring back the people who’ve never run a middling Wordpress site before!
Geohot wants to “refactor” everything. Elno explains to him that if he doesn’t launch features they’ll go bankrupt. “Why, what’s the runway?” Long silence.
Now some wanker is talking.
“What about free speech” well it turns out Elno has server bills to pay
He admits that banning pg was a mistake
Now they’re joking about Mastodon, which, fair
“Linux has a large codebase because it needs to support many different device drivers. Twitter needs to support a very limited core set of functionality”
Elno now sounds like he’s seriously considering posting Twitter’s source publicly to explain how bad it is
“We have a million kinds of Scala!” I… yes, sweetie, you have a Hadoop
Million lines
“I didn’t even know there were 390 telcos in existence” and that’s why he broke SMS 2FA
Somebody is recording this right??
I feel really bad for anybody who worked there now having to listen to these dudes gawp in awe and misunderstanding at what y’all built
(There have been zero female voices on this call)
Fortunately he got sidetracked on some business nonsense again, or I would need another bottle of wine
Oh my god it’s still going, Elno just bowed out. I thought they’d shut it down when he left but it’s still going. I’m not sure I can do more of this
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