Category: Uncategorized

This one’s just stream of consciousness, no editing or anything, so sorry if it sounds bad, it’s just what’s on my mind.

Apparently Twitter is on fire. I left the platform a while ago so I can’t confirm, but I can say I’m not surprised. When Elon bought Twitter, I was hoping he’d just let it go as is, and occasionally propose new ideas or updates. As the incoming Owner and CEO, I’d expect him to understand that he probably has a decent amount to learn about current operations and how ideas are experimented on and implemented. It does not seem like he did that though, instead opting to go in, tear everything apart, and reconstruct it in his image. The problem is that you can’t expect to rebuild a platform and also have it operational at the same time unless you’re running A/B tests for each feature, and it can’t happen all at once unless you take down that platform temporarily. That on top of having engineers print out their code to keep those who committed the most being a horrible idea just reeks of someone who thinks they know more than they do about what they’re working on. I don’t mean to say that like it’s just a him problem, of course all of us bite off more than we can chew occasionally because we assume we have a higher skill in an area than we actually do, but while he can run a car company fairly well, Twitter isn’t cars. I’ve also had a lot of people tell me “But he’s a developer, he sold a game he made and helped found PayPal, so he knows how this works”. I won’t discount that first part, but he wasn’t an active developer in PayPal either. He bought his way into the company post-founding and paid for his title, so I wouldn’t say that really counts towards his credibility. That on top of that he hasn’t worked on development in years should mean that he won’t have current experience of workflows and management structures for CI/CD that I’m sure are used at Twitter’s corporate level. Now with all the engineers leaving, I’m not sure if the site will fully recover. The user base is there, and I don’t think they’re going anywhere if it survives, but if I hadn’t already left, I’d be off the platform permanently now. I don’t want to unnecessarily bash him, as I don’t really like bashing anyone, but this really got under my skin as an experiment engineer and developer.