OP here, and Director of Community at Toptal. This is the first live article, but we've got loads more in progress covering a bunch of different projects and technologies.
Ballsy to lead with an article about porn. I'm glad you did because I know they must face scaling challenges that only a handful of services have to deal with, but rarely do I see articles about how they overcome the challenges. Thanks.
I'm glad you liked it, it was a lot of fun. I also implemented on the fly transcoding, but that's probably for a different article.
For the tech, well really at that place we used pretty much what everyone else did. Not a lot of big secrets, as far as I know the porn driving the tech revolution thing is ridiculous.