Twitter Not Rocket Science, but Still a Work in Progress

While it may not be rocket science, the Twitter team has been making a concerted effort to effect better communication with their community at large. Recently they were set-upon by a barrage of technical and related questions and the resulting answers are actually somewhat interesting. "Before we share our answers, it's important to note one very big piece of information: We are currently taking a new approach to the way Twitter functions technically with the help of a recently enhanced staff of amazing systems engineers formerly of Google, IBM, and other high-profile technology companies added to our core team. Our answers below refer to how Twitter has worked historically--we know it is not correct and we're changing that."

Comments

Re:It's the algorithm, stupid

[recoiledsnake]

Some web frameworks make it easy to scale and some don't. I don't why you need to get all worke d up when people say Rails does not scale easily as well as other frameworks. Rewriting Twitter in C may not yield much benefits but if it makes it easier to go out and buy 10 machines and make it scale even with a algo that isn't super perfect or elegant, that's better than having a framework that doesnt' do that.