The old, perl codebase was a pain -- I should know, I wrote it.(via reddit)
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of course, this was just integration with an off the shelf search solution that was available internally. but engineering was focused on the rewrite so nobody had time to replace the old search engine (xapian, which did an admirable job, but not at that scale)
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The writer is accidentally correct - we were told that it had to be in PHP to get ops support. Curiously the PHP part didn't take that much time - the majority of the "business logic" is in C++ which took forever and ever to write. I think the open question now is whether the remaining team will be able to innovate or be stuck in complicated codebase hell.
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Right. The PHP part was not the time sink. On the other hand, the general rewrite took forever.
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They had the technology, but the relevant staff had higher priorities.
While it seems to be par for the course for big companies to screw interesting start-ups after a take over, these comments are pretty revealing all the same. Rewrite software to make it easier for ops ? As more and more software moves to the data center, ops is becoming one of the potential pain points and political power centers. I have been ranting about this to a couple of friends and don't seem to be getting my point across. I think one way out of this mess is a new breed of programmer administrators and automation tools like Puppet.
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