[otterley]

You don’t know that it was “their mistake.” Unless you’ve personally successfully scaled a suite of nontrivial services equivalent to GitHub’s to accommodate an unexpected 14x increase in traffic, you respectfully have no basis for such an assertion.

[dijit]

I have.

You could argue the scales are different, but computers are also faster now.

So, argument to credentialism out of the way... What should we do as consumers if a provider that is a defacto monopoly due to network effects stops functioning?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947719

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jharasym/

[otterley]

> You could argue the scales are different, but computers are also faster now.

Scale is everything and a faster computer doesn’t always help. Vertical scaling has limits, and complex distributed systems are complex.

Since you seem to possess a diagnosis and remedy with a reasonable amount of certainty, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you and have you fix all their problems for them. Especially if you can do it while not making the problem worse in any dimension.

[dijit]

The link in my previous comment answers the credentials question in detail- including specific technical post-mortems on horizontally scaled stateful systems. Vertical scaling wasn't the topic.

[otterley]

You’re missing the point: a doctor doesn’t diagnose and practice medicine on a patient he hasn’t thoroughly evaluated himself. This is the sort of wisdom that a staff engineer and CTO is expected to have earned.

[Aurornis]

> I have.

I skimmed your profile. Working on the infrastructure for a couple mid-tier video games is a cool accomplishment, but equating this to having solved GitHub level scale rings hollow.

GitHub has a couple orders of magnitude more daily active visitors than the games you worked on had at their peak.

You can make valid criticisms of GitHub without trying to reduce their scale or inflate your credentials to create a false equivalence.

[dijit]

"false equivalence" needs an equivalence claim to be false.

I didn't make one. The sentence after "I have" was literally "you could argue the scales are different."

GitHub spent a decade asking the world to host its code with them. They got what they asked for. You don't get to beg everyone to run services for you for ten years and then have "scaling is hard" be the answer. They should be improving, not regressing over time, and they have some of the worlds best engineers and a trillion dollar corporation behind them, they don't need my sympathy.

The original question is still open and nobody's engaging with it.

[Aurornis]

> I didn't make one. The sentence after "I have" was literally "you could argue the scales are different."

Don't you at least see how it's misleading to respond "I have" in response to a question about scaling GitHub-scale services?

Trying to caveat it with "the scales are different" misses the point. The parent commenter was talking about scale.

[cnewey]

I'm not sure that resorting to personal attacks against the parent commenter for making a legitimate critique is the right, fair, sensible, or mature approach here.

Discarding legitimate criticism based on some self-determined criteria of intellectual superiority isn't a good look. It smacks of elitism and isn't something conducive to a productive and positive community discussion.

It is unhelpful, rude, condescending, and completely fails to address the underlying problem.

[otterley]

The commenter inserted his own personal bona fides (as a proxy for skill, experience, and knowledge) and use them to bolster his conclusion of culpability and incompetence of the GitHub team. If you take that risk, you should expect to be challenged if those skills are not up to par.

Put more simply: if you get into the ring, you’d better be prepared to take a punch.

[Aurornis]

Not a personal attack to fact check someone's claims.

I didn't bring their credentials into the conversation. They did.

[VirusNewbie]

Ok, well, I work on systems quite a bit larger than Github, and I think they have a major reliability issue.

[otterley]

That’s not in dispute. The question is whether we should be supportive of the company’s efforts to improve reliability, or whether we should keep punching down. How would you feel if you were in a similar situation and outsiders breathlessly provided uninformed opinions about your problem and questioned your competence?

It’s all about the Golden Rule.

[mattmanser]

Yeah, they should be testing for that, right? I think there's a lot of people reading comments like yours and thinking, is this person a paid shill or what?

The earn bucket loads of money, they should be planning for exactly that. And testing for it via load testing every day.

Perhaps you've forgotten the days of GitHub presenting themselves of software engineering thought leaders.

[otterley]

I’ve worked at some very well-endowed organizations. Having money is no guarantee of a particular outcome. There is a lot of money chasing a limited supply of talent. Moreover, distributed systems that were built long ago with certain assumptions can’t be refactored as quickly as the HN populace might believe. The Mythical Man-Month is a popular book for a reason.

[c-hendricks]

> Perhaps you've forgotten the days of GitHub presenting themselves of software engineering thought leaders

Genuinely could use a refresher here.