
Interview with a Pornhub web developer (2019) - brlnwest
https://davidwalsh.name/pornhub-interview
======
eric4smith
Back in the day I did work at a group of one of the largest adult websites.

Tech was PhP, MySQL, memcache and similar vanilla stuff running on many Linux
servers - pretty simple stuff.

The trick was performance. Simple stupid mistakes that would not be detected
in sites that have low traffic become enormous problems in a high traffic
server.

Pretty much nothing was dynamic and we wrote scripts to create static pages
for almost everything except search and authentication.

Things like logging just could not be done. It was easier to load a bunch of
data in memory on a request and process it instead of running a slightly
slower SQL query, since a ton of those could kill the database.

And yes, there were no placeholder images or videos. After some time you just
get used to it and code. But I have to say you get pretty desensitized to it
and when I resigned from that job my life in that area improved quite a lot.

Highlights were p*rn stars and random celebs visiting the office - but after
some time that got kind of meh.

The job itself was just a programming gig and very professional except for the
images on the screen which we learned to ignore.

On the whole, the guys who ran the thing were a pretty solid and great bunch
of people and it was one of the best dev experiences in my long career.

~~~
commandlinefan
> after some time that got kind of meh.

When I was younger, I used to while away time by browsing exotic vacation
destinations (that I couldn't nearly afford) on travel websites. One day, I
got an offer to work at one of them. After about a month there, the last
damned thing in the world I wanted to spend my free time doing was looking at
travel website destinations. Made me re-evaluate what sort of jobs I'd want to
do day in and day out.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Work ruins everything. I helped a friend set up a dance studio and it ruined
dancing for me for a little bit. Some career advisors say "If your hobby is
your job you'll never work a day in your life". Bad advice IMO.

Now if you could figure out how to do it without either customers or bosses...

~~~
citizenkeen
Best advice I ever got: Do what you like, not what you love.

If you do what you love, what you love becomes work.

Is you do what you like, then you like your work, go home, and have energy for
the things you love.

~~~
john4534243
I am a non native English speaker. Whats the difference b/w like and love ?
Both seem synonymous to me. If i love a person or thing i definitely like
them.

~~~
gdubs
Usually a difference in intensity. Love is what one feels towards their dog.
Like is how they feel about their brand of dog food.

------
acatton
> We actually don’t use placeholders when we are developing the sites! In the
> end, what matters is the code and functionality, the interface is something
> we are very used to at this point.

Interesting... 5 years ago I was contacted by a recruiter for a job offer in a
(sic) "non-standard industry". Back then, "fullstack development" was the job
trend for "people who deal with computers".

During the first call, she told me her client was the biggest adult website in
my EU country of origin. She insisted that the working environment was (sic)
"clean".

I raised that topic during my interview with their CTO. He told me the
opposite of this post: devs were running the website locally with place-
holders and innocent cartoons videos. He was straight-forward about it and
mentioned "of course, once in a while you have check an issue on the live
website, the way we handle this is by joking about the live content between
us."

For those interested, they had a pretty standard stack for such a high volume
website. Postgres, Django, Redis and RabbitMQ with an HAProxy frontend.

~~~
jilles
I am actually very curious what adult website uses Django? My understanding
was that most of them are written in PHP and re-used across various domain
names.

~~~
conradfr
Jacquie et Michel, which is a very popular site in France, uses Django.

~~~
acatton
I'm the top comment poster. And, yes, the company in question was the company
behind this website.

------
arecurrence
I stumbled into a meet and greet with these guys a few years ago. The
recruiter invited me to an event for one of the world's largest content
distributors. The role actually sounded really interesting and I assumed this
was a corporate edition of CloudFlare but upon entering the social... ...well
they had pornhub signs everywhere.

They ended up being a really cool group to meet. Very interesting people with
a lot going on in their lives. They had a strong entrepreneurial culture and
many employees had their own companies on the side. Their home base is
Montreal; it sounded like it didn't pay as well as other areas... but they
were quick to point out that the cost of living is among the lowest in North
America and that Montreal is a really cool city (This is true).

The most significant thing I remember is a surprising number of people walking
by tried to get into the event. :)

------
rasz
I did a small contract involving scrapping pr0n websites (top ~20). Most are
using very similar back-end infrastructure (similar/same apis, storage
structure, data formats), leading me to believe there might be maybe 3-4
owners and the rest is just branding/business siloing. Obvious one is the
titan MindGeek and its pronhub tube8 youporn redtube xtube, but even smaller
ones are run in this way like porntrex/shameless. Then there is user facing
tech stack, with majority using [https://videojs.com/](https://videojs.com/)
player, HLS is very rare, pretty much >90% just serve mp4 files.

~~~
c3534l
There is most definitely some kind of porn site white-label thing going on.

------
stickfigure
I wrote something similar for Quora some years ago. Since Quora links seem to
be a faux pas on HN, I'll paste it here in its entirety:

\-----

 _What is it like to work on the development team for a porn site?_

I was the Chief Technology Officer of Kink.com 2006-2007.

I will say in advance that every company is different and my experience will
not necessarily resemble the experience you will have at another company (or
even Kink today). There's more variation among companies than among
industries. Still, here are my observations:

* There's a lot of really awful technology in the porn business. It's the content that sells, not the technology. You'll be amazed by how many thriving businesses are "my first PHP project".[1] When I arrived at Kink, the core infrastructure was essentially a system that processed credit cards and inserted a username/password into an apache dbm file. No CRM, not even any idea if bob123 on one site is the same person as bob123 on another site. Most porn sites start like this, so expect to deal with a lot of legacy code.

* Third-party tools and services generally suck. The really great payment systems like Stripe and WePay won't touch adult content, so you're left with third-tier processors who can barely keep their sites online. A disproportionate amount of your concentration will focus on reliable (and redundant) billing, because your provider may suddenly decide to exit the industry with almost no warning. Some variation of this same problem exists for most of the cloud services you commonly take for granted - CDNs, email delivery, support desk, etc. It has gotten somewhat better over the last seven years, but you will often feel hobbled compared to developing "normal" software.[2]

* It is hard to hire good people - yeah, even harder than it is for normal development jobs. This surprised me. I have a large and talented social circle to draw from, but a couple key individuals rebuffed my intense lobbying. These are progressive, sex-positive Bay Area folk who would have loved to come work with me, but couldn't accept the inevitable explanation to their mother-in-law what they did for a living. Some of my team hid their employer from their extended families.

* The salary is good, but there is no other long-term upside. Adult companies don't go public, and the few that broke this rule have been fiascos. You won't get stock options, and even if you did you couldn't sell them. Unless you're a founder and getting a direct share of the profit, negotiate hard for cash.

* If you're in a production house like Kink, technology is not at the top of the totem pole. My department was 10 people out of a 100-person company and remember, it's the _content_ bringing in the customers. Combined with the pay differential between production staff vs technology staff, it can produce ugly politics. At one point the head of production got a list of all the salaries in the company and _exploded_ at me. I had to patiently explain to her that we pay six-figure salaries because that's what you have to pay to get technology employees, and we still had unfilled job openings. I'm sure there are politics at department head level at all big companies, but the cultural gap between unrelated fields didn't help.[3]

* Speaking of a 100-person production shop, a significant part of your responsibility is to support internal users. It's not nearly as glamorous or fun as building customer-facing software, especially when you start with a rotting pile of hastily-developed internal tools. But this is just as important for keeping the porn flowing as managing the data center. On the other hand, internal users would have your entire team perpetually building software for them and the paying customers wouldn't get any new features. Marketing has an agenda too. It's a balancing act very different from life in a startup where all you do every day is add features to your product.

That probably sounds more grim than it was. There were some fantastic things:

* Building software that millions of users around the world actually use. Gigabits of traffic, zillions of hits per day. It wasn't Google traffic, but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than business apps or yet another game that EA was going to cancel on me. If you work in the porn biz, you will almost certainly get enough real users to feel like someone cares.

* Working with fun, creative people. The set builders and directors were making art cars and art flicks in their spare time. Kink was a very hair-down kind of place - it was actually fun to go into the office. To me it felt like a big family - sometimes warm, sometimes squabbling, always chaotic.

* Office parties... oh, the office parties. Friday after work was happy hour for employees and friends of employees in the Bar Set, which conveniently was also a fully stocked bar. Guest listing was coveted and most nights ended in the massive Hot Tub Set on the roof of the building. I met a lot of great people at these parties, including my wife. I'm not saying this will happen at every porn company (it doesn't even happen at Kink anymore), but it's hard to imagine it happening at nonporn companies.

* I loved the moment when you meet people at cocktail parties and they inevitably ask you what you do for a living. "Pornographer."

In case you are wondering:

* Yes, porn gets boring. The novelty of looking at your coworkers naked wears off fast.

* Most pornstars are pretty much just like everyone else out of costume. For some it is a hobby/thrill and a convenient source of extra spending money (maybe $1-2k for a day). Most have what I would call a healthy attitude about pornography and BDSM, but there are a handful of damaged ones.

* If you're considering working in porn, the main question I would ask is: Would you be embarrassed to put it on your resume? Some people are very self conscious, worried what future employers might think. IMHO those concerns are overblown. If you can "own it", don't be afraid of the industry. That said... there are definitely some awful companies in the industry (as there are everywhere) so do your due diligence.

[1] This is not criticism. The hard problems in porn are 1) marketing content
and 2) producing content. If you solve those two problems, you have a thriving
business no matter what your technology stack looks like. #1 is _way_ more
complicated than you imagine.

[2] In 2006 there was _one_ CDN which would handle porn - Limelight Networks -
and they were getting sued by Akamai over patents. It cost $30/Mbit (95th
percentile) at volume. Now you have your pick of dozens, at rates a small
fraction of that. This chart is what allowed the explosion of tube sites:
[http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeerin...](http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeering/Entries/2012/1/3_CDN_Pricing_Trend.html)

[3] It's also possible that Type A personalities naturally rise to the top of
a BDSM company.

~~~
klyrs
> It's also possible that Type A personalities naturally rise to the top of a
> BDSM company.

 _teeheehee_ you said top

I read all that morbidly curious about actual D/S relationships infesting the
work culture. I'm a little surprised, and relieved to hear how professional it
sounds.

~~~
pyuser583
> I read all that morbidly curious about actual D/S relationships infesting
> the work culture.

This is why #MeToo is a thing. I say that as someone who has mixed feelings
about #MeToo.

------
bigtunacan
Some things I'm curious about are not addressed in the article.

First, how does the pay compare to industry standard?

Second, for people that have moved out of the industry how did it impact your
future opportunities?

I feel like it would be more difficult to find new employment outside the
industry due to the negative stigma attached.

~~~
distrill
> I feel like it would be more difficult to find new employment outside the
> industry due to the negative stigma attached.

I don't share this feeling at all. None of my peers would have any stigma
attached to anyone we knew worked in this industry. In fact, if anything the
opposite would be true. The porn industry deals with scale that most others
don't, and often leads innovation on things like video players. It's not
uncommon to see youtube copy features that showed up first on a porn site.

~~~
wtracy
I don't care whether my peers feel any stigma. I care about what the hiring
manager feels.

I'm convinced that the mid/upper management at the B2B companies I've worked
at (and the one defense contractor I've worked at) would not be pleased. OTOH,
Google, Facebook, and Amazon probably wouldn't care.

Of course, I've never worked for an adult entertainment network, so I don't
actually know.

~~~
Mikushi
You'd be wrong, I worked in public sector, for defense and other corp related
gigs and it's never been an issue.

What I've learned in my years at Pornhub is invaluable and has made finding a
job stupid easy.

~~~
user5994461
Agreed. I would add that the other way around is harder (from defense to other
tech industries). There is bias in US tech circles against working in defense
and you can't talk openly about what you did depending on the project.

------
Supermancho
Most interesting bit for me was to hear

\---

Most of our sites use the following as a base:

Nginx

PHP

MySQL

Memcached and/or Redis

~~~
nitrix
Another former developer here [1][2]; the memcached cluster is what keeps the
entire thing afloat.

We used to have dedicated 50 Gbps fiber connections straight between the web
and memcached nodes, but now the caching is done locally on the web servers
with a lot more of them. I would say there's probably something like 100+
servers, 128/256GB RAM each.

All the pages are server-side rendered. Every DB query, every DAO object
instantiated, every partial/full page HTML render, even some functions at
times, gets put into cache. We weren't really afraid of high traffic, that
scaled almost on its own... instead we were afraid of infrastructure
maintenance or bad manipulations, because too much of the cache could
disappear at once.

The most incredible part to me was the storage and delivery of the video
content. Try to picture 7000 petabytes [3] :)

[1] [https://www.pornhub.com/humans.txt](https://www.pornhub.com/humans.txt)
[2] [https://github.com/nitrix](https://github.com/nitrix) [3]
[https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-
review](https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review)

~~~
Mikushi
> All the pages are server-side rendered

I should add that this wasn't out of optimisation, just "old-school" PHP+Html
with an MVC framework to serve the rendered page.

Still can't beat that in my view.

> The most incredible part to me was the storage and delivery of the video
> content

That was the fun bit, I still remember the logistic of opening a new origin
for the CDN back in 2010 (11 maybe?). Flying hard drives, can't beat that
bandwidth.

(Former developer here as well, however from before this humans.txt was
introduced)

~~~
Throwaway958
Former Ashley Madison here with basically the same tech stack.

------
bkane521
Looks like it was hugged to death. Internet archive link here:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200724225904/https://davidwals...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200724225904/https://davidwalsh.name/pornhub-
interview)

------
aasasd
YouPorn made a big-ish article about their stack, ten years ago or so. The
backend in particular was of interest for me. For that time when clusters just
started getting popular, they were rather exceptional in their scale and thus
performance requirements: notably they put HAProxy in front of multiple
replicas of Redis, for the throughput—while for me Redis was the second-
fastest thing around after Memcached. Also apparently they were massively into
using syslogd for logging and statistics—with a multi-tier setup where nodes
aggregate entries from other ones. Again, that's before logstash and such plus
Elasticsearch became widespread.

------
vanusa
_I’m very proud to work on these products, those close to me are aware and
fascinated by it. It’s always an amazing source of conversation, jokes and is
genuinely interesting._

I wouldn't say porn sites are the most regressive (or otherwise evil) thing in
the world, by any stretch. There's much, much worse stuff going on out there.

But the complete absence of _any_ introspection as to the obvious negative
side effects of the product he helps push -- not to mention the notoriously
exploitive aspects of the industry that creates that product -- all wrapped up
in an almost sheepish "What's not to like?" attitude --

is, sadly, quite typical for Big Tech.

------
intellix
Am working in the online casino industry and was always told that porn sites
are at the forefront of technology but based on this interview it seems that
pornhub are clearly not

~~~
protonfish
It possible that they are using the best current tech and what is fashionable
right now is actually garbage that would never work for a high volume, easily
maintainable site.

~~~
TallGuyShort
I'm relieved to see others with this sentiment. I enjoyed full-stack
(including front-end) development back when JQuery was just starting to be a
thing. Now when I have to dig into these layers where you have an Angular
components wrapped inside some React stuff that's all part of an Elm app I
just hit a mental block too fast. I don't understand how anyone can reason
about their code in such an environment...

~~~
cutler
Angular inside React inside Elm??? Does such a thing really exist or did I
miss the hyperbole?

~~~
TallGuyShort
Angular and React intermingled, yes. Elm in the same project, yes. I'm still
unclear on the relationship between what was Elm's responsibility vs.
mainstream JS framework's responsibility.

------
zxcvbn4038
I had a brief stent at a company that hosted some adult sites - it was really
awesome because there were people constantly trying to hack the sites and get
the restricted content, it really kept you on your toes.

My dream job would be someplace like pornhub. Even if their stack isn’t the
latest and greatest, the challenges that come with their scale has got to be
over the top amazing. Like Cloudflare level amazing.

I’m on the wrong side of the country for both, but I can still dream...

------
john4534243
How about the ML stack ? Looks like porn sites has improved the recommendation
systems a lot over the years.

------
uxcolumbo
Can't access the interview at the moment.

Was this trafficking topic discussed [0], i.e. the site hosts criminal content
and the owners apparently didn't do anything about it.

[0] [https://traffickinghub.com/](https://traffickinghub.com/)

Criminal Content = child pornography, rape videos and filmed exploitation.

Edit: Clarity

~~~
uxcolumbo
Wow - quite a few down votes on this one.

Care to explain why you felt to downvote the parent comment that highlights
serious issues with PH?

~~~
hevelvarik
Because a lot of people watch porn and have a ton invested in the notion that
it is a completely normal and healthy human activity. The ‘normalization’ of
porn is an emperor with no clothes.

------
nicodds
If you think about it, the adult-media field is scalable by design

~~~
therealdrag0
Are you saying they know how to grow their content to show users? And they
have no problem handling any load dumped on them?

------
eloff
>We are generally at the forefront of trends and big changes in tech as they
roll out, which keeps it fun and challenging.

Still phasing out jQuery and using php and mysql. I'm sure their streaming
tech and video player are cutting edge, but otherwise their stack sounds like
a large, legacy webapp.

~~~
unethical_ban
I guess I should do more of my own research (I am security ops, not dev) but
when did jQuery become legacy?

~~~
sbarre
jQuery provided a lot of quality-of-life functionality that is now part of the
native Javascript language/runtime on modern browsers.

The most famous likely being the selector querying functionality, and the
event management (and I'm sure others I am not thinking of).

jQuery still works, but under the hood it's just proxying those native
methods, so you might as well just use those native methods directly.

