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"Twitter is easy to build"
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With every uninformed comment of that ilk, this XKCD comes to mind, which ironically presents an example that has gotten much easier to do since it was published in 2014, while building Twitter has gotten *marginally* easier since then (thanks to the open sourcing of tools for building at scale that used not to exist).
xkcd.com/1425/

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re: "Twitter is easy to build"
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@ekuber I think it also misses that twitter is "easy" to build if you stand on the backs of other companies giant infrastructure teams, and throw money at them.

Which you can do now. If starting from scratch. But twitter is already maintaining their own data centers and points of presence. Migrating from your own hardware to someone else's isn't easy. Even if it was it isn't necessary going to save you money - just change who employees the staff that you're paying.

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re: "Twitter is easy to build"
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@GregMorenz absolutely. Twitter has some tech debt from building things that now have open source alternatives that didn't exist back then. They also have a tech stack optimized for their workloads, so even today it wouldn't be easy to move, regardless of staffing.

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re: "Twitter is easy to build"
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@ekuber @GregMorenz A nice blog that talks a bit about this https://danluu.com/in-house/

They not only had tech debt, but they also had people that really understood the stack.

This is a bit akin to how Netflix knows FreeBSD well enough to tune it to extreme throughput. They could likely do the same with Linux, but FreeBSD is the stack they know. Twitter knew their stack well it is rare that it went down for the past few years
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