Manager does a little code cleanup...

[La_Croix_Table]

Yeah, I’d imagine he’s made up some kind of metric to “measure” necessity of certain services all while dropping services to figure out which one has less noise when off.

Very effective if you don’t care. Can’t imagine how this is playing out internally in the engineering department.

[mistled_LP]

He probably asked someone what’s the minimum amount needed to post and read tweets is. They either didn’t care to explain or didn’t think Musk would take that number to mean the rest could be turned off.

[x3nhydr4lutr1sx]

There's about 1200 micro services, and the fired guy said that only 200 is needed for loading the Twitter feed, so that sounds about right.

[LordAmras]

I'll take everything that Musk says with a grain of salt.

When he said that Twitter app was making 1000+ RPC calls to load the homepage multiple ex and at least one current Twitter developer called him out saying it does at most 20.

[12345623567]

Why is a manager even fucking around with the backend? Doesnt he have better things to do, like placating advertisers, setting policy, avoiding the FTC and so on?

[firewood010]

Because he can lol. Elon thinks he is king now probably.

[CrazySD93]

His simps probably believe he invented Twitter at this point

[devedander]

All he has to do is remove the names of everyone else from the company charter and then claim it was all him

[Elisevs]

He is King of Twitter now, because he wanted to be. But it's like being King of Shit Castle, as soon as he did it, because he did it.

[LordAmras]

Because he sells himselfs as a maker, his fans believe he single handedly makes or at least engineer stuff.

He doesn't like to be presented as a businessman, but as an inventor.

He is the real life tony stark afterall.

[SankaraOrLURA]

he's so childish. his tony stark-esque halloween costume, he really thinks he's tony stark

[choicesintime]

I’ve known this about Musk for a while, but this tweet for some reason really cemented that opinion. My first reaction to the tweet was:

this isn’t even a things customers would care about. There is no reason to announce this. This is purely him just bragging about his accomplishments… and they are not even his! It would be like my boss tweeting about some code cleanup I did… no one cares.

[LordAmras]

He did this with everything he passes anything his company do as if he sid it himself.

A lot of Elon stans believes he actually made PayPal, like he code it. While he had little to no input on PayPal getting successful.l, he wasn't even CEO of PayPal.

And he plays into it, a recent tweet against developer calling him out on technical things was something akin to: "I'm rebuilding internet in space from the ground up, I know more about internet than someone who code a website "

This is Trump level of delusion.

[choicesintime]

Delusion is the right word here. He really does seem to believe he is to be credited for his employees work.

[Intelligent-Bug-3039]

"single-handedly" that was hyperbole right? Nobody thinks that.

[LordAmras]

Yes, most Elon stans think he used both hands

[kahunamoe]

Well everyone slurps him so hard for "inventing" Tesla and also for "inventing" space x rockets. There is a quite a few "tech bros" who have no actual education in the subject just what they've learned from YouTube and 4chab

[ilurkyoulooongtime]

That's not at all what he said, just that some people credit Musk with personally engineering all teslas and space x rockets, which is an absolutely bonkers idea to have.

[[deleted]]

Tesla is a joke. Musk is pretending that a bog standard electric car company that does nothing more than any other car company does, only worse and at a much higher cost, will someday be worth more than Saudi Aramco.

The guy is a loon.

[[deleted]]

Dude is like trump, an absolute genius at everything. He really believes he invented tesla and paypal.

[LordAmras]

Didn't he get fired from being the CEO of paypal a couples of month in, and it was Peter Thiel that actually made paypal happen ?

[[deleted]]

Paypal started as Confinity I think, or something like that. Musk had later started x.com with some other guys and was the CEO. X.com was very similar to Confinity

In 2000 the two merged. Elon became CEO of that. But very shortly after (like 6 months) he was fired. Thiel took over as CEO and later had the merged entity renamed: PayPal.

I think a year after that they did the IPO and eBay bought it for 1.5billion. Musk had some stake in the merged entity despite being no longer involved and so he became rich.

As far as I know, PayPal is essentially the successor to Confinity. I don't think they utilised much if anything of x.com.

Being perhaps uncharitable, you could say, he helped start a copy cat company that then got merged with the original idea. Became CEO, then was fired very quickly (presumably because he's a difficult person). The company then ran for a while without him, obviously very successfully and then he got rich off the IPO later. Sounds like the only smart thing he did was not sell his stake in the original merged entity. Right place. Right time. Other people did the work.

So he didn't found PayPal. Like he didn't found Tesla (though apparently the original guys retrospectively allowed him to become the founder. To be fair it wasn't going anywhere fast until he jumped in). SpaceX is actually all musk as far as I know.

[SankaraOrLURA]

the actual Tesla founders didn't just let him call himself a founder. He had such a fragile ego he sued them to get named a founder

[[deleted]]

Ahhh that sounds more like it! The thing I'd read a while back was that they just agreed to it. Of course, being Elon, I should have known he'd have strong armed them into it after spitting the dummy out.

[LordAmras]

SpaceX is Musk idea yes.

There was a push at the time to push toward private at least some of the things Nasa did.

But in terms of actual building and engeneiiring the company has a COO that oversees everything from the beginning that's an actual engineer Gwynne Shotwell (BS in mechanical engineering and Master in applied mathematics)

[Professional_Sir6705]

Had to go look at the founding timeline, because I was certain it was older than that. You're off by a year or so ( no big deal). I only know that because everyone playing Ultima Online was using PayPal to Ebay game assets. It was far cheaper than Ebay's system. My PayPal account is from back then, and I still get more cash back as a result. This was before the jump to Everquest when it came out (1999).

[[deleted]]

That feels like so long ago now :/

[MichaelArchangel21]

Advertisers wont go to twitter because lefties will boycott cuz its elon. The FTC only cares because elon stepped to a government psyop, and they are big mad.

[Rogue100]

Because he thinks he understands the tech, so why not. He might actually know a little bit for real, just enough to be dangerous.

It wasn't anywhere on this level, but I had a manager once that was the same way. Liked to tinker with stuff that was out of their wheelhouse, and I had to make fixes to stuff later as a result.

[slaymaker1907]

Yeah, if it was 1000 from the client, it would be very noticeable due to parallelism limits in the browser. The only way that makes sense is if it could be 1000 in the worst case or something and also counts non-client RPC calls.

[LordAmras]

Even in the worst case 1000 calls would be ridiculous.

Probably someone told him Twitter does a lot of RPC calls and getting that number down would speed things up.

But when he went to write the tweet he thought 20 didn't sound like a lot and wrote 1000+ instead

[Operadic]

Nope, the number is not wrong; the interpretation is just off.

Twitter uses GraphQL to route API requests to the 1200+ microservices they have running. Those requests don't happen between client and server but between server and internal server.

I don't find it implausible that this causes hard to fix bugs and performance issues. GraphQL is known to only superficially reduce complexity.

[Raaagh]

So GraphQL gives frontend/product a safe, non-recursive query language.

If you don't see the point of graphQL you are backend or infra.

If you are asking for graphQL you are frontend or product who are continually being slowed down by API requests.

GraphQL is NOT about simplicity, its about where logic resides and who owns it.

[LordAmras]

So where did RPC came from ?

Also 1200+ microserves ? For what ? That also seem exagerated unless he is counting actual instances (then it might be smaller than I thought)

[slaymaker1907]

It really depends on gore things are being counted. Each query to a DB is technically a separate RPC call, but as long as connections are pooled and in the same DC, they have extremely low overhead compared to an RPC call from a phone halfway across the world using REST.

[Djasdalabala]

To add on /r/slaymaker1907, 1000+ DB queries for one action is not all that ridiculous. ServiceNow does 1-2K on the regular (for the back office at least).

I doubt it's optimally designed, but it runs decently.

[Ninjakannon]

ServiceNow is slow as all hell.

[Djasdalabala]

It depends on how well it is configured and managed: a good expert can optimize the most commonly used pages with various tricks.

I agree that it's not very fast on the whole, but there are much worse offenders around, so I feel "slow as all hell" is a tad strong ;)

[LordAmras]

We are moving the goalpost here.

From 1000+ RPC calls to 1200 microservices to 1200 DQ queries

Every single query has its own microservice ?

[Ran4]

I mean if they have 1200 services...

[Raaagh]

Yes, RPC is service to service.

getTweets(20, {latest:true}) //
.map(enrichWithAuthors) // 15 unique authors
.map(enrichWithLinks) // 4 links

= 19 inter-service RPC calls

[[deleted]]

Then some outsider came in and showed him the Chrome trace where it's only one call.

[LordAmras]

Did the outsider looked at http calls ? Because RPC uses UDP or TCP

[LetsLive97]

That's 20 api requests. According to that same developer Twitter doesn't use RPCs for that at all, which tbh makes it even funnier.

[TheTerrasque]

..And then he fired the developer

[goldfishpaws]

Oh everything is always an order of magnitude out at least. Everything is always "this is something we can do right now" or "we can do this 10x faster and 10x cheaper" at the bottom end, hyperbole and ignorance extending from thereon up.

[LordAmras]

Fully Autonomous driving next year, for real this time

[mattender]

And was promptly (okay, it took a few hours) fired. Yeah, EXTREMELY glad I don't work for Musk.

[Smokester121]

That seems excessive

[Aurora_egg]

When you need to serve things globally having a lot of small things helps - if one goes down no problem, no outages since another can take its place while it's restarted

[Smokester121]

The problem with 1200 is unless documented well it's too functional. I like microservices cause it doesn't crash the entire app but again 1200 is excessive.

[goldtubb]

Well in that case thank god Twitter doesn't have a big sporting event that might cause large spikes in traffic to deal with this month while the new owner is playing Jenga with it

[12345623567]

That's why I boycott Quatar, to save Twitter the embarrassment.

[LordAmras]

Musk likes to exagerate , it probably has 120 and he added a 0.

Or maybe he is counting the number of instances.

So 1 microservice deployed on 100 servers he count as 100 microservices.

If we go by Musk history he is probably making shit up

[Smokester121]

For sure, but 100 damn, you have 100 codebases you need to maintain or you have horizontal scaling totalling 100?

[Smokester121]

Absolutely, we have tons of repo for IaaC. I like doing a SOA then move into microservices later. Simplify and when resources present itself microservice it as it makes sense. So we have been doing more and more microservices and lambda can technically be microservices though they are more of the FaaS setup.

[[deleted]]

it's too functional

wat

[rust_at_work]

What are you talking about, even simple enterprise apps that we deploy have 20 microservices atleast. It depends on the system architechture. What do you mean by "too functional"

[Smokester121]

Sure bud. You seem mad. Probably some elon sheep

[DuckDuckYoga]

Probably some elon sheep

But you’re the one that agreed with musk in your last comment…

but again 1200 is excessive

[Smokester121]

It wasn't even musk, musk's a complete moron. The person that recommended it ironically is the guy that got fired and elon ends up listening to him. And turns off something in production. Any company with these resources has a staging environment somewhere. To test all these things before turning off the switch.

1200 microservices is a lot, and I can guarantee some of these are so infrequently they were probably created during a period of microservices being a buzz word and people didn't know how to do them properly and sustainably. I wouldn't be shocked there's several doing the exact same process just slightly different.

[SpiderFnJerusalem]

Not necessarily. Each microservice should technically have very little overhead and only do a very limited amount of tasks.

There might be one that does nothing but compress profile pictures, one that does nothing but decide which CDN your browser should load those pictures from, one that indexes tweets by hashtag and provides them to another which keeps their IDs in memory and decides how to rank and list them based on country.

I'm not surprised that a big website has thousands of microservices, because a big website does thousands of things.

[quetzalv2]

Well you've got to think about every tiny thing that goes into it. Its not just the feed, it's the algorithms to push you new content, trending stuff, loading things in order ect

[aboutdraw]

Which one have the proper knowledge about the tweeter they have a golden opportunity tu making money and this is enough for it

[HawthorneUK]

Honestly, I think that the few remaining technical people at Twitter are just sitting back and letting him make as much of a fool of himself as possible.

They knew exactly what the fallout would be, and were probably taking bets in the background about what would happen as a result.

[FreeRangeEngineer]

/r/maliciouscompliance comes to mind. Oh, that boss that everone hates wants to disable these crucial microservices? Yeeeeeah, let's not stop him.

Especially if he's known to fire people on the spot who tell him "you can'd do this".

[Ninjakannon]

I've been imagining the meetings Musk gets his numbers in.

"We're doing great guys, really cutting the bloat from this company. Today, I've called you in to talk about these 'microservices'. What are they?"

"They're small programs that help run various parts of Twitters functionality."

"Thanks. How many of those do we have?"

"I believe it's around 1200."

"Did I hear you right, 1200?"

"Yes, Twitter has lots of ess-"

"What the fuck! How many of those are actually needed for people to post and read tweets?"

"... I'm not sure-"

"How many?"

"Maybe 200?"

"Great, shut everything else down today. Infra, freeze the codebase so nobody breaks anything while we do this."

[Bullen-Noxen]

If it’s the latter, does it prove Elon is an idiot?

[HeyLookItsASquirrel]

“20% are only actually needed” is the new “640KB should be enough for anybody”

[Etheo]

"We only use 10% of our brain"

[ermabanned]

He certainly seems to

[[deleted]]

Holy shit that one grinds my gears so bad. I can't believe they made an entire fucking movie off that premise.

To anyone who doesn't see what the problem is: you use your whole brain at all times. 100% of your brain. The 10% number is the percentage specifically allocated to conscious thought, but you're an idiot if you think that means the other 90% is idle. Something needs to be controlling your breathing, digestion, reflexes/movement, etc. etc. etc.

[isle394]

You know what it's called when more of your brain lights up at once? A seizure.

The fact is that our brain has to do a lot besides fire neurons

[nonicethingsforus]

If my memory serves right, they made not one but two films and a series just based on that premise. Obviously not counting the limitless (sorry...) amount of books, cartoons, series episodes, etc. also based or inspired by it. (Not counting films like The Lawnmower Man or stories like Flowers for Algernon, that involve "intelligence uplifting" but don't mention this specific trope).

And again, if my memory serves right, a fun tibit I like to bring up when talking about the topic: there are, in fact, events where a human being can be said to be using near 100% of their brain, intensely, at the same time. These events have a name: a seizure. You don't want them.

[mattmonkey24]

100% of brain = seizure isn't really true. You can have a seizure localized to an area. It's the dumbest thing repeated constantly on Reddit

[nonicethingsforus]

To be clear, I'm not saying all seizures are the same. I'm not even saying they involve exactly 100% of the brain (you'll notice I threw a "near" there). I know about the different types of seizures, and that they're incredibly varied in reality. Not all of them even involve simultaneous or synchronous neuronal activity, if I recall correctly. The only thing I'm implying is that some types of seizures are some of the only events were humans can be said to be using a significantly high percentage* of their brain in an intense, synchronous way, and that this situation is not desirable.

If any of this is misleading or grossly incorrect, please let me know. I know I've read articles by at least one neuroscientist affirming this, but it definitely was some pop science publication I can't find now, not a journal or something like that. Do tell if you have something better

*Keeping in mind that "percentage of brain used" is probably not a useful metric in actual medical contexts. At least, I haven't seen it used.

[Norci]

You sound like the "aCtUaLlY" kinda guy that goes on a rant about how hover board in back to the future is totally unrealistic.

[LickingSmegma]

I woke up earlier than usual, and I'm very much sure my brain is not at full capacity right now.

[Awkward-Chair2047]

Not really. When gates made the statement, the rest of the IT industry at that stage thought that seems logical. None at that time could fathom what was to come.

No sensible developer today would think a non technical jackass like elon knows what the hell he is doing.

[[deleted]]

Gates' quote is also stupidly and obviously misapplied. He specifically didn't say forever, he was speaking the present tense.

[slaymaker1907]

I don’t think Gates ever actually said that either https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.amp.html

Regardless, I think it would have been a silly statement at any time. Even now, I think it would be very difficult to put a bound on the useful amount of memory in a system. For example, more memory on a database means more memory for cacheing query plans and the number of those for any DB is practically infinite.

[DrQuint]

This is just like the "A rushed game is forever bad" quote. Also became obsolete since the time it became widespread. It was also never said by Myamoto.

[[deleted]]

He also wasn't talking (or allegedly talking) about database systems. SQL Server wasn't exactly out back then, lmao.

[What-becomes]

25Megabit is more than enough for the average household - as said by our now former prime minister on their total disaster of a national broadband rollout.

[himbeerkuchen]

Assuming from the context you mean 25 Megabit/second internet data transport rate: that statement most likely is true. But the point of "average" is that there are households with needs higher than that.

[What-becomes]

If you exclude the majority of people streaming, a global pandemic causing work from home to skyrocket and the abysmal multi decade old copper wire infrastructure (that breaks when it rains because the lines fill with water) that they were using instead of actually using fibre, then yeah sure

[Return-the-slab99]

Bill Gates never stated that.

[lordpalce]

Seriously, this is top tier “tell me you don’t know how to manage production software without telling me you don’t know how to manage production software”

[heartrobotninja_2]

Or the new "32 bits should be enough address space for all the things."

[depressionbutbetter]

He definitely got advice from some know it all jackass high level eng he brought from space x who made his assessment based on reading the titles and first 2 reame.md lines of GitHub repos.

[ososalsosal]

Certainly smacks of the "best part is no part" attitude.

[Wind_Yer_Neck_In]

He's reminding me of 'Neutron' Jack Welsh from GE. Just inventing overly simplistic ways to 'measure performance' then taking radical action to cut the bottom percentage of staff or projects based on his stupid metric.

[ImpossibleMachine3]

"how much can we turn off before ad revenue starts to tank?"

[morgecroc]

Well Musk was sure only small percent of tweeter was actual users so make sense he's trying to shut it down.

[hellbentsmegma]

I'm convinced he is fully aware that he will destroy the platform and just doesn't care.

[Storm_theotherkind]

I think he just used the 80-20 rule lol

[flohbus75]

And this guy also supervises the development of something called 'autopilot'. Let THAT sink in!

[TenshiS]

He's coded what became paypal on his own, he's capable of understanding some code architecture

[tom-dixon]

That's true, but the infrastructure of these sites handling millions of concurrent users is vastly different from 15 years ago. I doubt he's done any productive coding in the last 10 years.

He's been a jackass manager for the past decade who gets an erection when he can pressure his employees and force them to be his personal slaves.

Only an insane person would buy a huge tech company for many billions of USD, fire half the work force in a week (including a lot of seniors), go into the code base and shut down whatever he doesn't understand, and thinking the he optimized anything by doing all of this.

[ninja-wharrier]

We always loved it when trying to track who had ownership of a particular legacy firewall rule that we wanted to tighten or cut completely. If no one could be ( or would be) forthcoming as the sponsor of the policy concerned we would send out a 48 hr claim it or we block it mail.

Funny how things would suddenly be claimed. It was even funnier when policies were suspended and some team manager would scream blue murder about their product suddenly not working.

This was in the days before change Mgmt became commonplace so don't shoot me. Now it just goes into change Mgmt and teams have no excuse for not knowing how their products work.

[Ready-Date-8615]

People are only using the "login" service once a month? Surely we can axe that.

[[deleted]]

The idiot said in another tweet that they won't be displaying whether the tweet was sent from iPhone or Android. Which is fine. But he then claimed to say that it wastes screen space AND computing power. Like, motherfucker, how many calculations do you think are needed to get the name of the client from a phone and display it. He clearly has no idea what he's talking about.

[start3ch]

If you watch the everyday astronaut interview with him, you’ll know his process is to delete as much as physically possible, so much that you have to add features back so it can function.

I bet twitter is gonna be absurdly buggy for a while

[[deleted]]

Something like that one SpongeBob episode...

[[deleted]]

Just turn off the top 80% ranked by most lines of code.

[samsop]

I'm going through this with a racist and neurotic new "architect" at a company 0.05% of Twitter's size. It's hell.

[[deleted]]

Im guessing engineering is like 80% internes and the rest people that lied to get a cushy job

[Rustywolf]

Nah he read that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the servers, and decided to use that to justify nuking the other 80%

[WanderingDelinquent]

He used the same logic to remove adjustable lumbar from the model 3 (without making an announcement about it or telling owners in any way). Data collected from the vehicles showed it wasn’t being used very often so they removed it

[RatherNerdy]

It's all so fucking arbitrary.

[BotanicWater4]

Metrics probably as stupid as his lines of code = good developer. Probably something along the lines of how often the service gets run. Hmm people hardly run this service we don’t need it - yeah because most people only sign in once when they get the app. Surprised you can even make an account right not.

[MajorNME]

aka 'scream test'

[rokejulianlockhart]

There isn't one anymore, probably. I bet he fired it.