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Comment by _djo_ | Hacker News Reader

That he puts microservices scare quotes says it all, really. He clearly doesn’t understand modern large scale software architectures and is falling back on his archaic, outdated, and limited experience.

This isn’t the guy you want making these kinds of decisions. Even if there is bloat in services, which there inevitably is at any large company that’s been around for a while, it’s extremely unlikely that it’s 80% of them. Especially as Twitter’s infra team have in the past already done audits of running services to try to save on operational costs.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a serious outage or two in the coming couple of weeks.

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Microservices are simply... services. The term is stupid, but of course you get used to anything if you say it few thousand times.

I remember how long I wrote "cloud" in quotes when a decade back or so decided that a remote API from a datacenter should be called a "cloud" for some effin unknowable reason. But I got used to it.

Whether Twitter's architecture is good or not is unknowable to us. Microservice overload is an anti-pattern, not something to encourage. But in context it can make sense.

Point is a tech CEO in 2022 should not be using scare quotes around microservices.

Nor is Twitter’s infrastructure a black box, as there’ve been plenty of talks, blog posts, and other material that explains substantial portions of the fundamental architecture. We know why they adopted GraphQL as the client interface, we know why they’ve used Strato, Thrift, etc.

In fact I’d go so far as to say that the average mildly interested developer who’s been reading Twitter’s developer blogs has a much better idea how how Twitter actually works under the hood than its new CEO demanding they get rid of 80% of services.

None of this means Twitter’s architecture is above criticism of course. There’s undoubtedly legacy stuff and tech debt there. But it’s unsightly and unfair for Musk to be publicly denigrating the engineers of the company he now owns, purely because he can’t understand how things work.

As an ex-tweep, there are plenty of architectural decisions that I didn't agree with or that didn't go as well as had hoped. On the other hand, there were some amazing feats of engineering going on as well and a lot of super-talented folks. Just like any other high-visibility, high-scale system.

As much as I'd like to blame Musk's tantrums on his obvious lack of technical chops, I think it's far more likely that they're due to a combination of his piss-poor emotional intelligence and realizing that he was wrong about so many of his pre-purchase criticisms.

Now that he can actually tell that right-wing provocateurs were actually being algorithmically boosted and not suppressed, that there was no concerted "censorship" efforts (moderation is not censorship), and that the people he's been championing are full-on toxic to Twitter's viability and any chance at monetization, he'd rather burn Twitter (the service, it's most devoted users, and it's employees) down than admit he's wrong.

$44 billion say he can't burn down Twitter. If he burns down Twitter, he has to sell most of his Tesla shares. He'll fight tooth and nail to make Twitter work.

The problem is that eagerness to do a lot of work combined with incompetence & arrogance is by far the worst combination for a CEO, and I think Elon is exhibiting it with Twitter.

If he was in any way trying to save his stake in Twitter and Tesla, he wouldn't be acting out the way he is. Dude's completely divorced from reality at this point.

My wife's tinfoil-hat theory is that, after reading about the amphetamine problem at FTX, that many of the Effective Altruism cultists (Elon included) are hooked on speed and making some really horrible decisions.

Thanks for the insight, I think you’re right about those motivations.

> There’s undoubtedly legacy stuff and tech debt there

That's for sure, but I don't remember many instances of tech debt or bad architectural decisions which had been solved by just shutting things down.

Wait, does that mean we get to see the fail whale again? The good old days when Twitter was suffering as a RoR app growing too quickly.

20% of the services might be necessary to support home timeline rendering, but I guarantee that at least 60-75% of the remaining services are indirect dependencies.

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