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."

Comments

decade's, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:decade's, eh?

[sribe]

First of all, it's decades without an apostrophe you doof.

Apparently you are unaware that in modern usage an apostrophe no longer indicates possession or a contraction. It now indicates OMG WATCH OUT THERE IS AN "S" COMING UP NEXT!!!"

Re:Dubious story, dubious subject...

[alostpacket]

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.