Twitter is worth about 8-10 billion $(yes, with 10 zeros), and when you go to their website, you get this (See image below) --

This folks can sure afford the best of the best engineers, and they actually do have them.

So be easy on yourself when your app poops.

so I should take solace in this people's pain? That's twisted man.

@lordzouga:
Today I was talking to someone whose main argument for why we shouldn't build it, is because we don't know all possible requirements -- "I want to build the perfect software, how do you think places like G, Tw, FB, do it?" -- and my argument was, there is no perfect software, there never will be, no matter how rich you get, build all the redundancy, and even more redundancy --failure will happen.

Coincidentally, this happened. So it's not in rejoicing in other's pain (what's the point), it's in understanding that even the big boys fumble, understand your limitations.

Twitter has been phucked from the beginning for having poor architecture, using slow programming languages/frameworks and generally harnessing fuckry. Every dog and cat knows this.
"The best" my foot!
Twitter is a lesson on how not to use the easiest routes/languages and how not to make architecture so rigid that mistakes are taking years to correct.

Please tell another story, Twitter didn't begin having issues yesterday.

Call us when google, Amazon, MSDN etc fall over.

delomos: @lordzouga:
Today I was talking to someone whose main argument for why we shouldn't build it, is because we don't know all possible requirements -- "I want to build the perfect software, how do you think places like G, Tw, FB, do it?" -- and my argument was, there is no perfect software, there never will be, no matter how rich you get, build all the redundancy, and even more redundancy --failure will happen.

Coincidentally, this happened. So it's not in rejoicing in other's pain (what's the point), it's in understanding that even the big boys fumble, understand your limitations.

mistakes are allowed but telling me that because another person makes mistakes that its also okay for me to make mistakes is just not right. It is not encouraging at all. Perfect software doesn't exist... But we are all striving for that ideal software or methodology that we believe must exist. The only thing that this episode taught me is that if a site like twitter can crash or succumb to the power of the universe's infinite odds(with all their resources) how can I (that sometimes can't even afford power for his laptop) be able to make a dent with that same odds stacked against me... Its scary

I agree to many of your points, you're right, it's frustrating and outright discouraging to see it in that respect.

I'm pointing it out to be an encouragement, whatever you're working on, do your best, sometimes it might poop, but don't beat urself up for it, even the best poop.

@beaf: They truly might not be the best, but there are a lot of their engineers I respect (a lot), for at least their contribution to the [open-source] community. And the role twitter has taken in shaping online communication is not trivial, so maybe I should, say, they are the best at the problem they are solving.

delomos: I agree to many of your points, you're right, it's frustrating and outright discouraging to see it in that respect.

I'm pointing it out to be an encouragement, whatever you're working on, do your best, sometimes it might poop, but don't beat urself up for it, even the best poop.

@beaf: They truly might not be the best, but there are a lot of their engineers I respect (a lot), for at least their contribution to the [open-source] community. And the role twitter has taken in shaping online communication is not trivial, so maybe I should, say, they are the best at the problem they are solving.

you are right about them contributing to the open source community though... the founder was one of the people that designed Oauth's 1.0 protocol's specifications