Slashdot Mirror
How LinkedIn's Project Inversion Saved the Company
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."
Several points:
1. LinkedIn is actually a sort-of competitor of slashdot's owner. That's a bit of a weird slashvertisement choice(not impossible, but weird).
2. The FTC would come down on facebook like a ton of bricks if they tried to buy out one of the largest other social networks.
3. Remember to report spam on those emails so that someday we might collectively not get them.
Articles like this don't appear by magic. Businessweek wasn't crazy impressed with LinkedIn's infrastructure work. Don't be surprised to see a few more articles in the press/media and keep an eye out for who's gaining from them.
I work for a dot com older than LinkedIn which is crippled by a similar (worse) monolith legacy webapp. Innovation, efficiency, development cycles, new features and site/product-wide roll-outs are a pain or in some cases impossible. This story gives one perspective/solution to the problem.
Software is a fast moving space, you snooze you lose. As the web matures, I see many more once-prolific trendsetting companies slip into bureaucratic process-driven monoliths milking every bit of value the antiquated software still holds. The wise companies invest in technology and reap the benefits of the initially intangible results of a flexible, maintainable, truly agile technological stack, however, most companies eventually fall into the cycle of:
I have even gotten (plenty of) LinkedIn requests from people that I have never met and never talked to. Another thing that bothers me (a lot) is from people who know absolutely nothing about my professional capability endorsing my professional capability...