Valleywag
Before he left, former Twitter architect Blaine Cook's job was to assure the service's scalability," or the ability to expand to meet growing user demand. Didn't happen. Instead, Twitter leads all social networks in downtime so far this year. In a post to his blog today, Cook wants to make one thing very clear: He knows what scalability is, OK? If one eliminates database chokepoints and throws enough servers at the problem, even crappy code written in Ruby on Rails will work. Cook just couldn't make it happen for Twitter. Here's the 100-word version:
Languages don't scale, architectures do. Some languages are faster than others — a given operation costs less. Faster means cheaper, it doesn't mean more scalable. Perl used to be slow. Now it beats JoCaml with the bestest concurrency. What was Perl built for? Parsing text. Does it mean that you can't build Wide Finder with another language? Does it mean that you couldn't build Wide Finder to scale out to a trillion documents with gawk? If you answered "yes", go back to the start of this post and read again! :-) If you're still answering "yes," try reading some more.
Comments
Hey Nicholas, I checked your profile out on LinkedIn. What part of your writing career gave you the balls to call out Blaine's tech chops?
@WhatBubble: I think that anyone following the comments could figure out that there are a lot of people with tech chops who are calling out Blaine's (or lack thereof).
dude works for a tech blog and blogs about tech. ergo - tech expert!
Dude this guy is SOOOOO funny. He is always making dick and fart jokes, which of course are HAAAAAALIROUS
oh wait thats *Dane* Cook
@CyndyA: I'm not saying Blaine is right or wrong. But I know better than to opine about shit I know nothing about.
Melissa's a whore, so I trust her when she writes about prostitution. What's Daniel's credentials?
I'm too lazy to motivate over to LinkedIn, but I'm going to cut him a break. A) It's Valleywag. B) The article really is just a snarky rewording of Blaine's article. And C) He was dead on the money. I'm still trying to figure out what Blaine was trying to say in that post. That he couldn't architect a RoR implementation properly to have it scale on the Web? That Twitter, with no monetization scheme, wouldn't throw enough servers at the problem (the classic RoR solution?) He needs a lesson in pass-the-buck-so-someone-else-will-hire -you.
Dane Cook is about as funny as a tumor. Not one of those 300 lb tumors, though. Them shits is funny!
@WhatBubble: Who says that anyone needs any kind of expertise to publish in Valleywag?. This place is like a laundromat: to freely swap gossip about other people's dirty laundry while cleaning up stains on their own underwear.
For gossip mixed with "tech chops" will need to wait until Ted Dziuba starts a new blog.
Enjoy the hot air here, but don't put anything flammable in the dryers!
Hmm... Jezebel has Pot Psychology. Maybe it's time for VW to get its own herbally enhanced video. You could call it hashCode. Get some stoned dudes to debate tech issues. They would make about as much sense as average tech blog commenters, and definitely more than Slashdot. Mix it up by changing the "cognitive enhancer" to suit the topic of the day. I look forward to Lisp: a Symbolic Discourse and Triple your productivity by doing a few lines of C.
I'm going to have to weigh in here and agree that this hack has zero, z-e-r-o, zero tech chops, people.
Who? Cook, or the author?
If Twitter is one of the few large scale sites running on Ruby on Rails, what does its lack of robustness say in the endless debate about whether RoR is a good choice for large sites? Blaine Cook's comments sound like classic denial of RoR's shortcomings.
I'd love to use RoR -- I'm just afraid I'll end up with another Twitter.
I have always enjoyed Blaine Cook's singing in the Accused and the Fartz.
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