Personal Attacks over Appplication Performance are not productive

Joe B — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:10:10 +0000

I’m certain by now that we’ve heard throughout the blogosphere about what happened to Blaine at Twitter. Regardless of the cries of “Rails doesn’t scale”, it seems that this is the biggest thing to hit the Rails community since Zed’s pointless rant. Normally I don’t pay attention to most of the blogosphere, however since I know Blaine personally, and he’s someone who I can honestly say that I’ve looked up to over the past couple of years, as both a developer and as a friend, I think that the personal attacks based on a presentation where as a representative of a company, it is expected that you put a positive spin on what you are working on, this “He said scaling was easy! Twitter is DOWN!” nonsense is uncalled for.

The thing that I find with this speculation is that we don’t know what happened to Twitter. I haven’t spoken to Blaine personally in years, but I’m glad to see that other people are calling Michael Arrington out on this article, and that this is better left to Valleywag and other blogs that I don’t bother reading, which TechCrunch has joined the ranks of. Since this happened a couple of weeks ago, I’m suprised that none of our mutual friends up here has heard that he had left Twitter. However, I wish him the best, and he is definitely one of the smartest people that I have probably ever talked to about tech in this town. It makes me sad at the state of the industry, even when it’s gossip, to see this sort of story pass as a critique.

Joe@Nitobi » professionalism

Personal Attacks over Appplication Performance are not productive