David Smith

@Catfish-Man

he/him or they/them
dscoder.com/

“Listen: David Smith has come unstuck in time.” — Kurt Vonnegut, probably

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David Smith @Catfish-Man3/6/2023, 6:40 PM

Nire Bryce @NireBryce

jae @jkap3/6/2023, 4:58 PM

the slow operational bitrot of twitter remains absolutely fascinating to witness. i get the feeling some people will point to it as a case-study against microservices, when realistically it's a case-study against firing the overwhelming majority of your employees and leaving a skeleton crew struggling to keep a major social media platform online while forcing them to implement the dumbest possible features.

i strongly recommend against doing this.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce3/6/2023, 5:59 PM

I'm sort of in awe of the past engineers there even if the new ones are mostly trapped and rapidly burning out.

because this is like watching an entire season of improbable Star Trek engineering feats under impossible odds, with tooling and automated safeguards completely alien to most of them, made by an ancient, now lost, technically advanced culture.

sure, the space whale is rotting but you aren't getting home in that other ship.

the current team's capacity seems lacking at times (though at how big Twitter is, who knows. half of them haven't slept since November), but think about who came before them: they designed the most clown resistant worldscale machine/system we've seen a case study for.

the last time this happened was Sun/Oracle and that was just sad. (and VERY not clown proof)

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in reply to @jkap's post:

wren @FauxWren3/6/2023, 5:05 PM

damn I was gonna do this today but I guess I won't now

jae @jkap3/6/2023, 5:08 PM

god forbid women do anything

Andrew Brown @playcritically3/6/2023, 5:12 PM

It's a case-study against letting wealthy morons throw their checkbooks around to get their way. Oh, you're a billionaire? Good for you. No, you can't just buy whatever what you want.

@secrets3/6/2023, 6:47 PM

certainly against not being the guy they have to pay to wreck your shit

Lotte 'just an idiot' May @LotteMakesStuff3/6/2023, 5:15 PM

If anything it’s a testament to the architecture they built over there. You can fire 90% or your staff and have an idiot in charge, and it can still kinda limp along for months? They built something solid huh wild - I kinda expected it to be worse.

Matthew "Queso" Niederberger @Queso24693/6/2023, 5:55 PM

Yeah its ability to fail gracefully is probably a really good argument for microservices in that kind of massively scaling application.

alex tax1a @atax1a3/6/2023, 6:15 PM

as an ex-twitter employee, yeah basically this.

jae @jkap3/6/2023, 6:18 PM

yeah it’s genuinely impressive. it’s a deeply complex series of systems and, given that, i expected this to fail more dramatically more quickly. things only really started exploding when he started making changes

Vulpes Prime @Vulpes-Prime3/6/2023, 6:23 PM

It's like watching a plane fall during a pilot's amygdala hijack

Misty @dog3/6/2023, 6:32 PM

I’m not really a microservice person per se but it definitely feels like this is the difference between all of Twitter being down 90% of the time vs being half broken but usable

jae @jkap3/6/2023, 6:34 PM

yeah like i do not think microservices are the right choice for The Majority Of Companies but it did make sense for twitter and is absolutely making the difference rn

andi @mcc3/6/2023, 8:47 PM

I keep thinking about the incident where Elon Musk randomly posted "it turns out we're running all these microservices and we don't even need them! i told them to shut them all down". The most likely explanation for that comment was that he was just lying or someone lied to him and no one shut anything down, but part of me wonders a little bit if they had a workable, resilient microservices architecture and Musk went "microservices are bad! everything new should be not-microservices!" and now everything's 5% of the way into a total-stack rewrite which is increasing brittleness.

I am not really qualified to evaluate the appropriateness of microservices but my assumption is that a microservices architecture can work well and a monolithic architecture could take well but a thoughtless random jumble of some-monolith-some-microservices created without an intentional plan could get kinda bad.

Misty @dog3/6/2023, 9:19 PM

Yeah, there was an incident a couple months ago where Elon showed up on a twitter space to talk about how the site needed a total rewrite and no one could get any actual meaningful technical details out of him. Like with everything it's clear he had no idea what he was talking about but was sure he was making the right technical decisions anyway.

@secrets3/6/2023, 7:01 PM

it's definitely a lot more interesting to watch this kind of thing in action when it's happening to a website that was already pretty bad to look at for unrelated reasons than when it's happening to, like, your town's power grid

John Colagioia @jcolag3/6/2023, 8:14 PM

Absolutely. A few weeks ago, analysts were saying things like, "see? Developers and maintenance people don't really do anything useful, so people are going to look at Twitter and fire everyone in favor of a pre-schooler with an iPad, and it'll be fine." Now that it's not fine, it has to be a technical problem, and not deliberately sabotaging the platform. If it was a labor problem, that would mean that the last forty years of management science was wrong...

@shay3/7/2023, 4:37 PM

not management science, but practice. there is ton of research about management, but it is confined to scientific papers, rarely used by practitioners.

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