What was Reddit’s initial architecture?

Grant Magdanz — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 13:23:15 +0000

The core of Reddit is extremely simple. A user posts a link and other users can vote. I love Reddit’s initial architecture because it matches. It’s dead simple.

Reddit was initially written by Steve Huffman in the span of a couple weeks in Lisp.

They ran all of Reddit on a single computer that ran both the Lisp process and Postgres.

The database only had a few tables: links, votes, and users.

Steve Huffman explains it here.

How did Slack’s failure as a video game company impact its product?

Grant Magdanz — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 14:27:47 +0000

Slack was born out of a failed video game company called Tiny Glitch. The team worked on Tiny Glitch for three years before scrapping it.

During this time, they had built an internal communication tool built around an open source protocol called IRC.

This internal communication tool was the inspiration for Slack. The team wrote Slack from scratch, but their DNA as a video game company is still present.

Keith Adams, the chief architect of Slack, gave a great talk called “How Slack Works”. Below is a screenshot from that clip. You can view the full clip here.

DEV Community: Grant Magdanz

What was Reddit’s initial architecture?

How did Slack’s failure as a video game company impact its product?