Instagram co-founder on search, and co-engineering inside the Facebook empire

https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/instagram-co-founder-on-the-power-of-search-and-co-engineering-inside-the-facebook-empire-c7e7afecdfcc

by bbr • 11 years ago

44 10 11 years ago

medium.com

motional• 11 years ago

Articles like this make me think of a long lost period where everyone would listen with baited breath about the technical wisdom of Digg. Digg had a compelling product, and succeeded in spite of profound technical issues and ignorance, but invariably they became "leaders" of technology because of the position of the product (the Digg engineering team had front page after front page on here). Instagram -- and they are hardly alone -- falls in the same camp as Digg to me: This article details the most banal achievements, and would never, in a million years, be on HN if it weren't from a lauded product.

But here it is, in a long line of "Instagram did pretty basic things" articles.

As an aside, I've always carried a chip since Instagram did as so many Valley companies do and waved their hands claiming things weren't possible on Android. Since then I discovered Gallus, which is a vastly superior product than Instagram's offering, and makes none of the same excuses. A single guy did what Instagram wasted so many words claiming impossible.

joslin012• 11 years ago

I remember when Instagram had to shard their database to keep up with demand, and the article was so popular among developers. "Check it out, they split up the databases! Whoa!" I'm not trying to dismiss their work, but it was a relatively ordinary engineering feat.

mikeyk• 11 years ago

We (at IG) aren't claiming to be doing revolutionary things on infrastructure--but one thing I found super valuable when scaling Instagram in the early days was having access to stories from other companies on how they've scaled. That's the spirit in which I encourage our engineers to blog about our DB scaling, our search infra, etc--I think the more open we are (as a company, but more broadly as an industry) about technical approaches + solutions, the better off we'll be.

thomasfoster96• 11 years ago

I think part of the value is that it is Instagram that's doing it. It's reassuring to know that some method is actually being used at scale by a service with millions of users, rather than having to rely upon the experience of someone who merely knows the theoretical side of things.

Instagram's database sharding post was reasonably detailed and good at explaining things. Yes, the same info is probably on stackoverflow, but I'll waste a lot of time there trying to understand untested opinions.

kra34• 11 years ago

>>>> The example we like to play with internally is Halloween. It would be interesting if you were to see who are all the people posting Halloween costumes, and what’s the most popular costume. That would be an interesting use case if we had really great neural networks and machine learning. But right now we’re mostly using the textual content of people’s captions and their accounts.

Machine learning's most brilliant application to date

reagency• 11 years ago

Meanwhile, Google is doing what Instagram dreams about.

Instagram co-founder on search, and co-engineering inside the Facebook empire

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