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Twitter Death Knell

February 19, 2010 8:38:49.739

Live by the meme, die by the meme: As a commenter points out, this is a two year old story that I posted on without noticing that rather salient fact. Well, that's what corrections are for - nothing to see here, move along :)


If this TechCrunch story pans out, you can stick a fork in Twitter - they'll be dead soon enough:

We're hearing this from multiple sources: After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java (another solution is to stick with the Ruby language and move away from the Rails framework).

The problem is this: swicthing languages/frameworks is a very "enterprisey manager" type decision. Down in the development trenches, it means multiple man years of the following:

  • Standing still while the new system is built from the ground up.
  • Faults in the existing codebase will go largely unaddressed, as all the effort will be focused elsewhere
  • Competitors will have a lot more room to steal users, as it'll be obvious that Twitter is standing still

This isn't a solution; it's a way to circle the drain while others feed off their carcass The worst part is, the management team that made this call (if it has been made - it's rumor now) will walk away clean, blaming "developers" for the failure...

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posted by James Robertson

Comments

Re: Twitter Death Knell

[anonymous] February 19, 2010 11:47:09.566

You sure did recognize that this story in TechCrunch is two years old, didn't you?

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