And "art of programming" being prioritized is not actually a costly tech signal. More "things worth high-effort programming."
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so "things worth high-effort programming" means things like "a site with high traffic that actually demands fancy tech to keep it from crashing"?
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That's an example, and taking commensurate bet-the-company risks. This sort of thing for eg. is not something a bank would try to do despite having equally mission critical big tech.
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Other examples include problems running large data centers, all the Big Data stuff, Google's Spanner... big, high-risk infrastructure dev, where there may be little fundamental R&D to do, but a shit ton of systems design, architecture, optimization, and risk taking.
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I think I’m instinctively such a hardcore “software conservative” in this sense gist.github.com/ucirello/3cca2 that I read FB’s “software liberalism” as not caring about technical quality. But the Wired article is a story about a very “liberal” technical feat.
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It’s “liberal” both in the sense of “you’re still letting your programmers write PHP” and “you’re converting it to Assembly? What if things break!”
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AND that they’re solving their problems with a lot of iterative trial and error instead of with finding “the” root cause of slowness
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I wrote this after first talking to keith about this general philosophy
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Ooh this makes a surprising amount of sense. Consistently do small things that you expect to have positive externalities on the whole system.
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WordPress is another major piece of PHP-based infrastructure that I think has been somewhat less successful, but still pretty good, at keeping a liberal thing evolving for 20 years.

