What Jamie Wong did at Khan Academy

http://jamie-wong.com/2012/08/22/what-i-did-at-khan-academy/

by cbhl • 14 years ago

108 35 14 years ago

jc4p• 14 years ago

Going through the blog post I finally understand why I kept seeing Jamie's blog on the front page of here and my Twitter feed continuously for the last few months, it's really impressive how much work you can get done when you're working on things that interest you. Seems like it was a enriching and useful internship, good job to Jamie and everyone at KA.

misiti37802• 14 years ago

Am I the only one surprised by the fact that KA is hosted on Google App Engine?

phleet2• 14 years ago

Why do you find this surprising?

It's definitely had its ups and downs, but it managed to stay pretty stable when our traffic about doubled when CS launched.

dylanvee3• 14 years ago

+1 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404568

cbhl5• 14 years ago

I have to admit that I didn't think about this much myself -- most of the videos are on YouTube, and I hadn't thought about how the rest of the site was run. For all I knew, it was RoR or static webpages or something.

misiti37802• 14 years ago

although I have not used app engine much, it seems like you would have a lot less flexibility if you use it rather than EC2/Rackspace.

Also, Im not sure I believe statements like "its nice not to have to worry about scaling", although if it is working for KA at hundreds of requests per second, maybe it is an accurate statement

danmux2• 14 years ago

I think the Kahn academy has got good licensing terms, and dont generate lots of rows of data, or dont need to process lots of data. As a fairly static web app host GAE can't be beaten. If you do more with it I think you will face the same problems we had... http://www.moneytoolkit.com/2012/08/the-problem-with-google-...

spicyj• 14 years ago

At Khan Academy, we actually have terabytes of data; some of our tables have close to a billion rows.

Our backend does much more than just serve static files -- you'd think that we don't have to do much but we keep track of video and exercise progress, summarize progress by user and by coach, provide video recommendations, host a Q&A system with notification support, award badges in real-time while avoiding costly datastore queries, handle mailing lists and email subscriptions, and have support for having a public profile to show off your progress, among other things.

We handle hundreds of requests per second and it's really nice to not have to think about scaling very much -- with any other solution, we'd be doing a lot more system administration.

codegeek3• 14 years ago

I really wanted to read this blog but in IE7, the navigation section overlaps the content :(.

phleet2• 14 years ago

Oh crud, sorry about that.

You can read it here (without images, sadly): http://feeds.feedburner.com/JamieWong

Or if you add that feed to Google Reader or some other RSS reader, you should be able to see it too.

Will look into fixing this.

codegeek3• 14 years ago

np thx. this is just because i m at work and snooping around :). At home, I proudly use Chrome and Firefox

trafficlight• 14 years ago

Seriously?

cbhl5• 14 years ago

I think officially, 4% of users still use IE 7. [Edit: Source: http://theie7countdown.com/] Back in the day, IE was the most popular browser on the Internet, and I'm sure there are a lot of corporate applications written specifically for its quirks that simply don't work in newer browsers. Heck, the University of Waterloo's Learning Management System (based on the open-source Angel LMS) was broken in Chrome for the longest time -- the solution was to migrate to a different (closed-source) product altogether.

codegeek3• 14 years ago

It is embarassing that I have to use IE7 but this is at work :(. Large companies can be so behind in technology (another proof)

tnorthcutt• 14 years ago

The Instapaper text bookmarklet might come in handy in situations like this: http://www.instapaper.com/extras (scroll down)

ZeroGravitas• 14 years ago

Can't you turn CSS styles off in IE7?

kamens• 14 years ago

Worth repeating: every intern ever anywhere should blog a summarizing post like this at the end of their internship.

Not only does it have obvious and enormous personal benefits for Jamie, but it's galvanizing for the team to look back and read through just how much has been accomplished in a few months (I'm proudly on Jamie's team, am speaking firsthand).

pilgrim689• 14 years ago

Most interns cannot disclose implementation specifics and code like this. A lot of us work on larger business-facing projects. This type of blog post is pretty specific to the style of development he's doing (a bunch of small open-source web widgets and scripts).

darkestkhan• 14 years ago

Especially when it happens so that you are working in Space or Defense industry...

cbhl5• 14 years ago

I look forward to the opportunity to do this throughout my next internship in January.

Unfortunately, if I wrote such a post for the internship I just finished, I'd have to omit parts of it. Even though the company I worked for published a "Diary of a Summer Intern" series throughout the summer. :(

epriest• 14 years ago

Jamie Wong is amazing.

cbhl5• 14 years ago

+1 -- he was my role model for the longest time.

shock3naw2• 14 years ago

Was? :)

ddlatham• 14 years ago

My eyes trick me into reading that as:

What Jamie did Wrong at Khan Academy

martindale• 14 years ago

Same. The human mind at play.

robertelder• 14 years ago

Like this if you are in Jamie Wong's SE 2014 class.

psobot• 14 years ago

Hey look, we're all here!

shock3naw2• 14 years ago

The cool ones, at least.

vimota• 14 years ago

This is awesome! Not part of the SE class, but current UW eng student nonetheless.

fourstar• 14 years ago

You're an inspiration. Nice job and very impressive.

What Jamie Wong did at Khan Academy

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