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How LinkedIn's Project Inversion Saved the Company

Posted by samzenpus on from the get-it-fixed dept.

pacopico writes "Shortly after its 2011 IPO, LinkedIn's infrastructure almost collapsed. The company had been running on decade's old technology and needed a major overhaul to keep up with other social sites. As Businessweek reports, LinkedIn initiated Project Inversion to fix its issues and has since evolved into one of the poster children for continuous development and creating open source infrastructure tools. But the story also notes that LinkedIn's technology revival has come with some costs, including constant changes that have bothered some users."

7 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Dubious story, dubious subject... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I smell a Slashvertisment... Seriously, LinkedIn? Biggest spammer in my Inbox. Of dubious professional value. Facebook, *please* buy them?

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    1. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by alostpacket · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, there are a few "interesting" gems there. Though it's mostly business fluff. From TFA:

      Such companies as Facebook (FB) and Google also have special teams that review the lines of code written by developers. It’s these people who get to decide when a new feature is ready to make its way to their websites. Not LinkedIn. It has one, huge stash of code that everyone works on, and algorithms do the code reviewing. “Humans have largely been removed from the process,” Scott says. “Humans slow you down.”

      Uh, Okay. Automated code review? Um, where to begin? I think there an obvious misunderstanding on the part of the author of the article. Surely Google, FB, et. al., do CI and all sorts of automated testing. They just *also* use humans.

      Incidentally, Google clearly has more products, thus more specialties and codebases. FB also, to a lesser extent. I dont think the Google Search team is the same as the Google Maps team or the Android team.

      LinkedIn is a website, they have an API, messaging, maybe some mobile apps? It's not trivial, but it's probably not very close to the technical complexity of FB, and no where near the technical complexity of Google.

      LinkedIn initiated Project Inversion to fix its issues and has since evolved into one of the poster children for continuous development

      ...by stopping all continuous dev so they could rebuild from scratch...

      I think TFA misses the point in a very "PHB way" sadly. They took the time to make the devs happy and give ownership of features to devs. The result was the devs created an environment that was productive and could be continuously updated with less fuss.

      To me, this is the poster child for creating a dev focused culture, and taking the time to do things the right way. Which, sadly, is the exact opposite of the conclusion of TFA and the LinkedIn PHB.

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    2. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by tattood · · Score: 3, Insightful

      One is about your ego and broadcasting to an audience of other people who are all busy worrying about their ego and broadcasting to their audience

      I'd say that both sites fit that description. LinkedIn has turned into the "Facebook for professionals". It seems like most people's goal on LinkedIn is to connect with as many people as they can to get their "network" as large as they can. I have gotten LinkedIn requests from people that I met at a conference several years ago, and talked to for 5 minutes.

      LinkedIn used to be about creating a network of trusted colleagues, that you want to keep in touch with, so that you could get trusted introductions to people you didn't know. If I trust person A, and person A trusts person B, B trusts C; therefore if person C is looking for a job opportunity, then they have a good chance of being a reasonably good candidate. That whole concept seems to have gotten lost in the last few years, and now it is all about having as many connections as you can.

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    3. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Let me guess. First of all, you don't know the legal definition of spam. Because if you were getting spam from LinkedIn, they'd be in deep shit. Secondly, all this non-spam spam you claim to get: ever heard of opting out? Adjusting your marketing preferences? It's all right there, ONE CLICK AWAY.

  2. decade's, eh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First of all, it's decades without an apostrophe you doof. Secondly how can a company that's only a decade old run on "decades" old hardware? They bought ten year old computers in 2003?

  3. Cool, no details by stewsters · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So, an article with no technical details? Cool. What are they doing thats so new?

    A while ago I noticed their name on the bottom of this : http://www.playframework.com/

  4. Details Please by Ghjnut · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Where is all the tech stuff? I want to know what systems were swapped out, what was used in place or what was swapped, what the steps were (did they set up unit tests first followed by architecture changes and scalability testing), what new coding practices they employed etcetera. I'll sum up this horn-tootin session: "LinkedIn had to change to grow, and they did".

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