- RT @gAmUssA: Running Awestruct with Asciidoc on Windows with JRuby http://t.co/LV5qlCluZu 06:34:20, 2013-07-08
- RT @dweinberger: Fantastic set of @BerkmanCenter fellows announced! http://t.co/oFZNR3AMaq 10:00:26, 2013-07-08
- RT @DebQuentel: Thanks to our friends @pencelibrary for their continuing efforts to catalog all things CALI http://t.co/RCtkvsdcQk 10:22:14, 2013-07-08
- RT @ddraper: A University's Offer of Credit for a MOOC Gets No Takers http://t.co/5970G4Z4fY I agree w/ @downes' commentary on why there we… 10:24:00, 2013-07-08
- RT @fgbjr: An offer to Legal Research and Writing instructors http://t.co/o3OUBaJHwu 11:07:47, 2013-07-08
- RT @naypinya: Books in Browsers IV (#bib13) is open now for general registration! http://t.co/rXjyJpEZPH 11:10:56, 2013-07-08
- I am reminded, on occasion, that I toil in a quiet, dusty corner of academia, far removed from the hustle and bustle of the real world. 12:24:38, 2013-07-08
- RT @karenmcgrane: Five questions I ask conference organizers so I can ensure I give the best talk possible. On @thepastrybox: http://t.co/T… 12:28:05, 2013-07-08
- RT @DoWorkTogether: More room to collaborate with the Do task facelift! Learn more at http://t.co/3D0c3sOFQd. 17:10:47, 2013-07-08
How Twitter Runs And Runs And Runs
Everybody has this idea that Twitter is easy. With a little architectural hand waving we have a scalable Twitter, just that simple. Well, it’s not that simple as Raffi Krikorian, VP of Engineering at Twitter, describes in his superb and very detailed presentation on Timelines at Scale.
If you want to know how Twitter works – then start here.It happened gradually so you may have missed it, but Twitter has grown up. It started as a struggling three-tierish Ruby on Rails website to become a beautifully service driven core that we actually go to now to see if other services are down. Quite a change.
Read the article for a good summary of how Twitter runs. As noted, it isn’t all that easy anymore. The entire 38 minute talk is worth listening to, especially for anyone with an interest in designing next generation web apps.
One of the key points in the talk is that Twitter isn’t really a web site, it’s really an API with a web application built on top. The work is in getting the API to run as fast and as effectively as possible. The tech used to accomplish this is interesting because it isn’t just a bunch of database tables, and it is the future of the interactive web.