5 Question Interview With Twitter Developer Alex Payne

Interesting interview by Josh Kenzer of Twitter developer Alex Payne. On scaling:

None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.

On adding additional hardware:

We’re hosted at Joyent, and they make the “throw more CPUs at it” approach easy. We’ve been able to get new server containers provisioned within hours, generally.

(Via Simon Willison.)

★ Thursday, 12 April 2007