] HipMojo.com » Twitter’s Ruby Mess Proves: Time is Money, But Money Alone is Never a Recipe for Success

Twitter’s Ruby Mess Proves: Time is Money, But Money Alone is Never a Recipe for Success

It’s starting to make more and more sense now.  When Twitter raised $15-20M, I was surprised, because raising money to scale a business which lacks a business model is something that Twitter investor Fred Wilson is against.

Turns out the money will be spent on moving away from a Ruby on Rails infrastructure, according to Tech Crunch.

When publishing my Twitter’s 140 problems post, I talked to Heri Rakotomalala - who is a Ruby expert and runs a Ruby consulting shop - “why do I keep hearing Rails does not scale?”

He answered:

Because you read too much techmeme and stories about twitter.

more seriously, rails is a relatively young framework. very powerful but also very easy to use. developers who don’t have experience in architecturing big systems can use it to develop a web2.0 website with full features etc. then they are surprised it can’t handle the load. the equivalent of giving kids a battlecruiser.

also, at its beginning, some developers saw their server stopped working unexpectedly, but there are solid tools now to prevent this (monit, nagios, god etc to monitor the server)

fiy, here is a list of big companies using rails

for me, we are going through the same things that Java went through, at its beginnings, it was very slow, too complex, irrelevant to IT etc. And now 10 years later, it’s king in banks systems, insurance firms, healthcare etc. Rails is going the same way.

I guess time is money.  With so many big name VCs on board and Twitter being in the public eye, investors don’t want to wait for RoR to become stable.  They want stability -  now - and I guess there’s no better way to make the hands of time go faster than throwing money at it.

Yes, I’m being somewhat sarcastic there. Twitter has a lot of work ahead of itself without a code rewrite.  This might be necessary due to heightened pressures that come from accepting VC dough, but unless they execute this move perfectly, this might turn into a bit of a debacle.

Anyway, this might explain the “From Mess to Success” post Fred published last week.  He was probably coming out of a Twitter board meeting.

Tags: |
Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | May 1st

One Response to “Twitter’s Ruby Mess Proves: Time is Money, But Money Alone is Never a Recipe for Success”

  1. Michael J. Says:
    May 2nd, 2008 at 7:49 am

    An hour after the TC story, Ev twittered that they are not leaving RoR. Some of their existing code is not Ruby, maybe that’s why people are confused.

    As your friend said, it has nothing to do with RoR, but with experience scaling sophisticated systems.

Subscribe:


Leave a Reply

*
To prove that you're not a bot, enter this code
Anti-Spam Image

Subscribe:


« « previous post | next post » »
Admin

Shortcut:
HipMojo.com

Subscribe:

Search Site:

Categories:

Archives:

Blogroll: