I love that Tristan put out this post and made it so detailed with plenty of assumptions to cover. I also like to hear about possible issues and assumptions which the crowd calls out. Even naysayers can be helpful.
I want both, but I don't want to crowd to go to far and kill the desire to produce this kind of content.
To me most interesting are factors I didn't consider in features I did cover. Next most interesting are features I didn't cover which are kinda core to Twitter being good, and also pose interesting performance problems, like the person who mentioned spam/abuse detection. After that are non-core features which pose interesting performance problems that are different from problems I already covered.
The comments that I think aren't contributing much are ones that mention features that I didn't cover but make no attempt to argue that they're actually hard to implement efficiently, or that assert that because I didn't implement something it isn't feasible to make as fast as I calculate, without arguing what would actually stop me from implementing something that efficient. Or ones who repeat that this isn't practical, which I say at length in the post.
> I want both, but I don't want to crowd to go to far and kill the desire to produce this kind of content.
I think it's easy to have both. It's all about the tone of the responses.
For example, instead of "your assumptions are wrong, this would collapse because X" or "this is dumb because real Twitter does Y which yours doesn't handle," I think responses could be framed as:
"Wow, neat thought experiment! If I were to approach this same problem, I might make an allowance of more than 280 bytes of storage per tweet to allow for additional metadata that is probably needed to make everything work together; I wonder if that can be accommodated with an even beefier big computer?"
Or "What a great writeup of building a simplified Twitter! After the features you've accounted for, the next most important feature of Twitter for me personally is Y. What kinds of things would we have to do to stretch your idea to handle that? [or, I bet with the addition of X we could make that happen in this setup too!]"
I think many criticisms could be turned into constructive positive additions to the original article versus attacks against the idea of the article.
I love that Tristan put out this post and made it so detailed with plenty of assumptions to cover. I also like to hear about possible issues and assumptions which the crowd calls out. Even naysayers can be helpful.
I want both, but I don't want to crowd to go to far and kill the desire to produce this kind of content.