This makes me shiver in my boots. I couldn't imagine having to run that site myself. Neil is inline for a big pay raise.
* He was hired in November.
* He works on code, and didn't get woken up during
the last major downtime until the end (from their post
mortem, presumably due to the DB eating itself). The
word 'even' in "we *even* woke up spladug" is telling,
that indicates to me that he doesn't wake up often.
* Reddit is pretty much a done product, and the last
features I can think of were meta (Gold comes to mind)
Doing operations for a site the size of Reddit with a staff of 2, on AWS, is far more impressive to me. Keeping an operation like Reddit afloat in front of that many uniques must be a pretty significant challenge. There's not a lot of depth for on-call, so I feel for their sleep.
On top of that, jedberg is the sole voice actively fighting for Reddit's reputation in public, since (let's be honest) the exodus looks a little suspect. Watching his comments[2] in the face of a perceivably sinking ship -- not to mention former employees who are saying quite a bit in front of an impressionable user base[3] -- is interesting, to say the least.
They're definitely undergoing a challenge, and I'm interested to see how they come out of it. (Aside: Today has apparently been discuss-Reddit day, looking at my threads.)
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...
[2]: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/g6d7i/three_form...
[3]: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...