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by pram 2449 days ago
Yes. It seemed like every single one of their drivers was getting messages from one of their chat rooms in HipChat. It was like 25k people in a single room iirc. They seemed to be using it for notifications or something?

At any rate HipChat was already dead prior to the sale. Atlassian made a new program from scratch called Stride which was its own little awful can of worms.
2 comments
pandanomic 2449 days ago
Literally nothing in the first paragraph is true. For driver interaction, if it wasn't a push notification in the app then it would have been some sort of driver operations community tool like zendesk or similar.

> It was like 25k people in a single room iirc.

This never happened. I literally could not have happened. Uber ditched Hipchat when it was around 10k employees. The largest rooms I ever saw were outages or eng rooms with a few thousand, most with the room muted unless they needed something.

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pram 2449 days ago
Theres really no point litigating this 4 years later (who cares) but it did happen. Uber had bots of some type, thousands of them in a single room. They were the largest user of our v1 API, which was an ancient shitty PHP base, and whatever they were doing put an enormous load on our backend during peak traffic periods and crippled the entire service.

Seeing this behavior was as easy as doing a join in mysql for user ids and rooms. I mean it's likely you wouldn't have seen it, or the room, or had knowledge of it unless you weren't directly involved with whatever it was?

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user5994461 2448 days ago
It's actually quite relevant. I've worked in mega corporation, 50k employees and above. The inability of third party software to cope with the amount of users is a major recurring blocker for using off-the-shelf software and a big driver for developing things internally.

Most open-source and commercial software advertise that they can scale, but throw the first 500 or 5000 users and it's breaking apart.

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pandanomic 2449 days ago
With that context, I believe you. At the same time, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that no one at Uber realized this either.
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ska 2449 days ago
> It was like 25k people in a single room iirc.

Build it, and they will come ... and do something you hadn't planned for.

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