My first six weeks working at Stack Overflow

The hardware specs as of December 2013 are here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...

David means a single primary, there's a read-only replica for in DC failover and a read-only replica in our other DC for "New York is getting hit by another hurricane"-failover.

A few services hit the read replicas instead of the primary (our API, for example, moves what it can when it can), but the code for stackoverflow.com is almost entirely querying a single (quite beefy) box.

We can and do sometimes run without either replica in the AG, though we prefer not to except for scheduled maintenance.

I'm not sure if "MS stack is hard to set up and use" is the right way to characterize it. SQL Server is probably the easiest full-fledged RDBMS to get up and running, for instance, and Visual Studio is among the most friction free environments I've seen (for getting started at least).

However, I wholeheartedly agree that MS stack, mostly Windows, is hard to configure, monitor, and administer when you want to horizontally scale, primarily because of the GUI driven configuration mindset and proprietary nature.

That's actually what I am doing (I'm an oddball, I prefer Apple hardware and Microsoft software). I have an iMac running windows 8.1 and an external Cinema Display. So far, everything works and runs great. I would suspect if I did anything graphically heavy, I would run into some problems though.

I'm wondering the same. Visual Studio can be quite demanding (especially with Demon installed and Resharper)

There are a few things in our stack like Elasticsearch and Redis that we specifically run on the Mac and simply have the VM point to the right ports. This basically requires that we have both running simultaneously.

However, going pure Windows on a Mac is not entirely a bad idea either. There's a mix of devs here that use Mac or Windows - it comes down to personal preference imo

On a newer Macbook Air, I can even game in a Windows 8 VM. They've come quite far, and with things like unity mode in VMWare Fusion (don't know what it's called in Parallels) you get your VMs applications like they are somewhat native OS X applications.

There isn't much of a speed penalty, and especially not in "simple" things like an IDE.

Parallels has gotten extremely good at handling this. Switching from Cmd -> Ctrl actually isn't an issue at all (you don't need to switch at all). It's really seamless - the only problem is having one window from OS X going over to the VM and vice-versa. In addition, some ports running weird when running Redis and Elasticsearch on the Mac but pointed to from the VM.

How is that not hypocritical?

Yeah, relatively short. Spolsky was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994 (he drove Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications strategy.)

People seem to get a premium on their perceived 'time' spent at MS for being earlier employees, which often correlates with how important a system they worked on.

How are comments ordered?

I thought it was the points you see, but this one has 4 points and [other] has 6 points (at time of writing), but [other] is below this one.

Is it based on absolute number of upvotes (without subtracting downvotes)?

[other]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7146156

I think statements like this pay too much attention to implementation details. Their whole point of software is to serve the users, so when we (the users) are able to accomplish our tasks with it, it's good enough. And I don't see very many important tasks that one OS can accomplish better than another.

Operating systems are intrinsically different for many reasons.

I don't know first hand, but I'm guessing the scheduler would be largely different, as is the security methodology- heck I can't imagine much similar except 'code runs here, os makes sure code runs'

I remember my friend (a low level engineer at nokia) talking to be about windows 3.1 and how Microsoft put the GUI directly in the kernel because it was too slow otherwise, he went on to elude most of the security issues with windows were based on that.

also, when it comes to remote management and headless machines, the unix-like family rule the roost.

> There is zero information in your epiphany. You can say this about anything and it will have as little meaning. Cars are just cars. Movies are just movies. The only thing that has any value is the "different and not better" and that involves a subjective "better" which doesn't apply uniformly across people. Ultimately useful measures can be based on time and money, for example productivity, deploy speed, licensing expenses, etc.

I thought my meaning was clear. Maybe it's not to you, but it sounds like you did understand it, and just don't agree with how I presented it. And that's fine.

> Personally I hate the click and point everything UI in windows and prefer a sane bash like terminal with familiar unix tools, but that's entirely subjective.

I went from Windows to Linux for the WMs, and stayed for the CLI. Then I went to Mac OS X and stayed for the trackpad. Then I went to emacs and stayed for the keyboard. Now I'm using Windows 8 and am considering staying for the beauty.

Honestly, I don't put much stock even in my own subjective opinions anymore, since they change by the month.

There's about the same information in the parent comment, "StackOverflow runs on Windows, really?" - like the premise is absurd, but with no reasoning made.

Not necessarily. Depends on who it is and what the project is. For someone who knows Windows better, the cost of MS software may outweigh the cost of hiring someone to do the same thing in Linux, or learning it themselves.

I think that might be an oversimplification, certainly when looking at all of the costs (labor, management tools, environment, etc.)

They're different operating systems, and they each have different strengths. I run both Windows and Linux servers, and there are some things that Windows handles better, and some that Linux does.

A decade ago, a database consultant told us a story of helping a bank who was seeing their 3 MS SQL Server databases (on Windows servers) go down every single day. He replaced their setup with Oracle and their problems went away. In telling us stories of why he preferred Linux he described how he had set up and managed databases on a hundred Linux servers for a major oil company and they were humming along without a problem, easy to manage, and in contrast he dreaded Windows servers due to memory leaks and whatnot. Anecdotal, I know, but I heard a lot of stories like that a decade ago. I've also heard a lot of stories since then about Windows servers getting better. And I've had to administer each a little bit here and there, and I have to agree with the other commenters that you can't generalize about which is better because it really depends on what you're doing with the servers. But some of those stories from many years ago scared away quite a few people from Windows servers and they'd probably appreciate hearing how Stack Overflow is succeeding with the current generation.

Agreed. Windows costs a fraction of a single admin's monthly salary - cheap at twice the price - and comes with a selection of fast to install powerful software with built in GUIs for customizing it.

Shrug. No rush from my side of the room. I have found developing Windows application and web apps on the MVC .Net stack to be quite enjoyable.

Will the servers be running Mono instead of .Net, or are parts of the site being rewritten in a different language?

What about the databases?

To say the new MS Office lives in the browser is a bit of an overstatement. There is some support in SkyDrive and SharePoint for opening Office documents in-browser, (in some cases, I think requiring Internet Explorer), but it's feature limited.

Office 2013 is very much a Windows Desktop program. And now a Windows RT App, too.