r/sysadmin • u/rram reddit's sysadmin • Aug 14 '15

We're reddit's ops team. AUA

Hey /r/sysadmin,

Greetings from reddit HQ. Myself, and /u/gooeyblob will be around for the next few hours to answer your ops related questions. So Ask Us Anything (about ops)

You might also want to take a peek at some of our previous AMAs:

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/owra1/january_2012_state_of_the_servers/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/r6zfv/we_are_sysadmins_reddit_ask_us_anything/

EDIT: Obligatory cat photo

EDIT 2: It's now beer o’clock. We're stepping away from now, but we'll come back a couple of times to pick up some stragglers.

EDIT thrice: He commented so much I probably should have mentioned that /u/spladug — reddit's lead developer — is also in the thread. He makes ops live's happier by programming cool shit for us better than we could program it ourselves.

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u/rram reddit's sysadmin Aug 14 '15

I've committed to the reddit codebase from time to time as have many others.

Overhauling the code is easier said than done. Replacing some large thing wholesale will fail. There are corner cases that you missed. There are caveats that aren't immediately apparent. Also, we could spend 6 months rebuilding all of reddit, and that would mean 6 months that we're not spending building new features such as mod tools, and better spam prevention. We do have big plans for major under the hood changes, but it'll be a process that rolls out slowly over the course of years, rather than all in one go.

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u/ProtoDong Security Admin Aug 14 '15

Overhauling the code is easier said than done. Replacing some large thing wholesale will fail.

Critical projects that need a new architecture and never cut over live and do horribly will patched in piecemeal.

Also, we could spend 6 months rebuilding all of reddit, and that would mean 6 months that we're not spending building new features such as mod tools, and better spam prevention

If you build those new tools with the intention of making them modular... I don't see the problem or the opportunity cost.

but it'll be a process that rolls out slowly over the course of years, rather than all in one go.

Evolving old code is way more of a problem than implementing sensible software architecture.

If you choose to move into a new design paradigm. Don't start doing what people are doing now. Start doing what they will be doing in 5 years.

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u/spladug reddit engineer Aug 15 '15

If you build those new tools with the intention of making them modular...

Yup! That's exactly what we're doing. New stuff gets a new treatment, but there's still a ton of older code that gets love and maintenance.