keysersosa

Though I'm happy we got top billing in the headline, Reddit wasn't actually impacted directly (though of course many of the sites we linked to were).

At the time, in late 2005, we were writing in (I believe) python 2.3 and had rolled our own web framework because it was otherwise normal behavior to hook straight into wscgi. "wild west" might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but the available toolkit was certainly pretty bare bones.

It was also quite early in web 2.0, and I still remember when we switched up reddit's frontend to start using prototype.js (which had just come out earlier that year). Being able to use the same ajax call in both IE and Firefox! Magic!

Confirmed, but the time dependent model didn't ask for long. I seem to recall switching to the current model (with slightly different constants) during the switch to python in late '05.

That said, one of the early "mistakes" we made was not noticing the obvious step of taking the log of on the exponential form formula, which ended up meaning we had only a couple hundred days before we started to run afoul of the max float size in postgresql. I also seem to recall coming up with that obvious trick with only a few days to spare.

I too remember it being pretty harrowing at the time (if only because it felt like we were alienating [har] such a large chunk of our community), but in fairness it happened barely 6 months in. It all happened in a couple of weeks of quick work and I seem to recall we even recycled the db schema.

We did a post-acquisition python-to-python rewrite -- clean out the cobwebs, switch frameworks, and redo the database schema -- which was much harder, longer, and more painful to deploy. Though in that case it was one of those drastic changes whose primary side effect was that no none notices a thing.

We switched to python about 4 months into the startup and a full year before getting acquired.

Yup that was the case. Though, I believe it was also a long weekend -- I think it might have been Veteran's day because I remember putting the finishing touches on it around Thanksgiving.

Yeah it should be noted that all of the referenced decisions we made around web frameworks in this thread predate django's 1.0 release. I think I was comparing pylons to django 0.96 iirc, and in 2005 when aaron wrote web.py, I don't think django was on anybody's radar (or at least it wasn't on ours).

Django has definitely come a long way!

A lot of the decisions made in designing web.py were also carried over to tornado's web framework (which not coincidentally is also a web.py).

At the time (and I have to admit my memory is a little foggy as it was 7 years ago), I believe we mostly switched away from it for maintainability reasons. It wasn't under active development, and we were in the middle of a complete MVC rewrite to impose some order on some otherwise organically grown code.

At the time that we switched to pylons and decided to punt django, flask didn't exist. I believe it was some time on '07 or '08. I'd check, but I also think it predates our switching to git from subversion...

Personally I like flask a lot and it's come a long way. Also, when spez and I moved on to hipmunk we started using tornado.

Fortunately he didn't ask where I spend my time in Chrome.

Thanks for linking those. I would have posted here as well, but I didn't want to break any shameless self promotion etiquette rules, and honestly I feel like I've hit my quota for that for one day. :)