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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

I reckon I could implement 90% of the end-user functional features of Twitter in a weekend. The remaining 10% of the features would take at least another year, and the non-functionals (performance, reliability, observability, scalability, etc) would take me a lifetime. But that second sentence turns Twitter from a useful little tool into a valuable product.

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Precisely. Most of the developers, including seasoned ones look at an application and say I can build it over a weekend. Yes you can. For your own use. For it to become a real product which is stable and scalable, takes much more time and effort.

I think you mostly describe the problem with modern web development. There are frameworks and tools that makes implementing Twitter in a weekend possible. What we need is to make the non-functionals (performance, reliability, observability, scalability, etc) part 10-100x easier to scale.

So you are describing aws. The problem of infra is that you need someone to run it. Until then, either run it yourself or pay someone to do it

AWS doesn’t give you automatic 100% of NFRs, it just gives you more options in the trade-offs. For example, doing a database upgrade safely.

Everyone forget about back office functionalities, like content moderation, user verification, etc. That also applies the pareto principle, 80 20

You’re right, I didn’t even think about these! I still wouldn’t include them in end-user facing features, but try are certainly necessary to be a valuable product at Twitter-scale.

They have at least 2 web clients, iOS and Android native apps and this is not even taking into account analytics, ads or spaces.

What's included in that 90%? Because I don't think the "What is happening?!" form and the timeline quite cut it.

> I reckon I could implement 90% of the end-user functional features of Twitter in a weekend.

Building a Twitter clone is an exercise that's frequently used in system design interviews. It's a popular exercise because it's a trivial system to implement to meet client-driven requirements, but the feature set becomes progressively more complex when scale, performance, and business requirements are thrown into the mix.

I think someone complained about twitter search to elon musk when he took it over saying how he could fix it easily. From memory, he left pretty quickly and said ihe was unable to fix it

That would be George Hotz.

Text-book of how it takes more than just technical skills to get things done.

George Hotz. Here's an HN discussion about when he joined: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723257

The top comment is funny in retrospect. "He already removed the login prompt which was a huge annoyance as a read only user of twitter." Twitter is now significantly more unusable as a read-only user, as you can't see beyond the first tweet in a thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34074344

His resignation four weeks later.

It's not features you'd be missing but userbase

Not only, most of twitter’s features are in fact not public facing and are those which are making money.

Public facing features are just the loss leading part of Twitter. It’s even probably a little portion of the company’s code base.

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