Interesting Links for 26-3-2011

[andrewducker]

• MySpace loses millions of users in a few weeks. (Myspace still exists???)
  (tags: myspace music web2.0 EpicFail)
• Why Tolkien prevented Maurice Sendak from drawing The Hobbit.
  (tags: MauriceSendak Tolkein EpicFail)

Comments

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Fuck MySpace!

Friendster rocks!

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

ORKUT 4 EVA

[snarlish.livejournal.com]

Tove Jansson did alright with the Hobbit...

[andrewducker]

Oooh, those are cool. I hadn't seen them before.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Here's the most insightful thing I've seen about why MySpace sucked and kept sucking:

Having been in a position where I was able to work with some of the programmers who worked at MySpace, the issue wasn't the engine (weither it was on ColdFusion or .NET), it was the enviroment they choose to breed for their developers.

Management would say "We need X feature NOW to remain competitive". They would then select a group of developers to implement that feature. The biggest problem was they didn't allow the develoeprs to have staging or testing servers -- they deployed on the production servers on the first go-around. Sometimes these developers were given 5 or 10 projects that they had to deploy in very little time. And all this with no change management or control. No versioning either.

MySpace management never wanted to go back and review code or make it more efficient. Their solution was "more servers". They ended up hiring a crew who's sole job was to install more servers. Meanwhile they had developers checking in buggy code and they were racking up technical debt at an alarming rate. At the time MySpace was running two major versions of their application server behiend what was recommended for use. When Microsoft & New Atlanta came around, they jumped at the idea to essentially sell off their technical debt (like a mortgage to a financial firm), and have somebody else take care of their problem.

The problem then was Microsoft was not updating their old code, they simply were adding new features on .NET. This didn't solve their problems and left them in a situation where they still needed to fix the old stuff, all the while updating new code.

The issue with MySpace was this : they are a classic example of when you don't listen and you accumilate too much technical debt. Fixing old stuff should be a priority, and doing things like change management, version control, testing and development servers, etc. are all a must. This is why the bookface is able to deploy new changes with little impact -- they have everything tested and proofed out before they let their actual users play with it.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, that sounds about right.

You can live with almost any language or tooling - but if you never go back and fix your buggy code, and you don't test before release, then you're fucked from the time you start putting your code out there.