Hardware Podcasts

Fail Whaling

Oxide and Friends · 26 Apr 2022 · 1h 42m · Episode 13

What this episode covers

Guests Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, and Jason Hoffman recount the chaotic early history of Twitter, detailing how the platform evolved from the podcast directory Odeo and the hackathon project twttr. They discuss specific engineering failures, including a Rails exception handling bug that caused massive CPU overhead and a directory limit issue caused by millions of test files, which was eventually solved by migrating to Amazon S3. The conversation also covers the technical infrastructure of early Twitter, such as the use of BigIP load balancers, Mongrel, and the eventual shift to Java and Scala, while reflecting on the cultural shift in Silicon Valley from on-premises infrastructure to cloud-native scaling.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Twitter, Odeo, NetApp, Amazon Web Services
Products
S3
Tools
BigIP, Mongrel
Also
Ruby, Rails, ZFS, Node.js, Java, Scala, Parrot, MoarVM

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