After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails…
As a Django fan and evangelist, I admit it would give me great pleasure to see this as a colossal failure for Rails, point, laugh, and generally poke fun at all the Rails fanboys and girls.
But let’s be real for one minute. Twitter doesn’t suck because of Rails. Twitter sucks because they have ridiculous amounts of traffic (especially to their API and SMS gateways), a limited ability to cache (a non-realtime Twitter is a pretty useless Twitter), and (as far as I can tell), they’re not making any money, so they probably have limited resources to pour into more hardware.
The bottom line is that Twitter will probably cause major scaling problems for any platform, be it Rails, Django, Java, .NET, PHP, or tin cans with a string tied between them. Ruby is undeniably slow compared to Python, Java, and PHP, but I really doubt the problems Twitter deals with are at the Ruby level, anyway. Much as I wish they weren’t, anyone who says Twitter sucks because of Ruby on Rails is either foolish or joking.
Twitter sucks because of Rails. Just joking. Visit site »
My Twitter status page on jeffcroft.com now shows who I talk to/about the most: http://jeffcroft.com/statuses/ :)
A weird thing happened today: during our meeting, I had a hard time hearing @twatson.
OH: She looks like an office manager.
Great Mac-buying advice from the guys at Macword. There definitely are still a lot of people out there who seem to think you need a Mac Pro or Macbook Pro for even moderately heavy use, such as that a typical web designer does. In reality, a Macbook or iMac is plenty of computer for 90% of users out there. General rule: unless you’re a hardcore Mac gamer or doing professional-level video editing or 3D modeling, you probably don’t need a pro-level machine. Visit site »
NetNewsWire sidebar tabs zero!
If you use Django and Omnigraffle and find yourself mocking up Django admin screens, this could be useful. Visit site »
A large database of celebrities, coupled with the products they use, with a pretty design slapped on top of it. Awesome. Visit site »
You Look Nice Today is an audio-based Journal of Emotional Hygiene, staffed by lonelysandwich, scottsimpson, and hotdogsladies.
In other words, its a podcast by some of the funniest dudes on Twitter. Check it out. Visit site »
Safari is probably the most reliable browser out there when it comes to rendering things as a standards-aware developer would expect, but there are those rare times when you need to target it specifically with some unique rules. For those cases, this article will point you in the right direction. Visit site »
Its name is a bit on the cheesy side — but wow, this is one sexy-lookin’ car. Visit site »
Jeez! Had a ridiculous amount of e-mail this morning, and it’s got me running late getting into the office!