
Instagram co-founder on search, and co-engineering inside the Facebook empire - bbr
https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/instagram-co-founder-on-the-power-of-search-and-co-engineering-inside-the-facebook-empire-c7e7afecdfcc
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kra34
>>>>> The example we like to play with internally is Halloween. It would be
interesting if you were to see who are all the people posting Halloween
costumes, and what’s the most popular costume. That would be an interesting
use case if we had really great neural networks and machine learning. But
right now we’re mostly using the textual content of people’s captions and
their accounts.

Machine learning's most brilliant application to date

~~~
reagency
Meanwhile, Google is doing what Instagram dreams about.

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motional
Articles like this make me think of a long lost period where everyone would
listen with baited breath about the technical wisdom of Digg. Digg had a
compelling product, and succeeded in spite of profound technical issues and
ignorance, but invariably they became "leaders" of technology because of the
position of the product (the Digg engineering team had front page after front
page on here). Instagram -- and they are hardly alone -- falls in the same
camp as Digg to me: This article details the most banal achievements, and
would never, in a million years, be on HN if it weren't from a lauded product.

But here it is, in a long line of "Instagram did pretty basic things"
articles.

As an aside, I've always carried a chip since Instagram did as so many Valley
companies do and waved their hands claiming things weren't possible on
Android. Since then I discovered Gallus, which is a vastly superior product
than Instagram's offering, and makes none of the same excuses. A single guy
did what Instagram wasted so many words claiming impossible.

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joslin01
I remember when Instagram had to shard their database to keep up with demand,
and the article was so popular among developers. "Check it out, they split up
the databases! Whoa!" I'm not trying to dismiss their work, but it was a
relatively ordinary engineering feat.

~~~
mikeyk
We (at IG) aren't claiming to be doing revolutionary things on infrastructure
--but one thing I found super valuable when scaling Instagram in the early
days was having access to stories from other companies on how they've scaled.
That's the spirit in which I encourage our engineers to blog about our DB
scaling, our search infra, etc--I think the more open we are (as a company,
but more broadly as an industry) about technical approaches + solutions, the
better off we'll be.

~~~
hellameta
This is exactly right and further I think comments like above scare a lot of
people out of posting information that may be useful to others. I'm quite
surprised by the sourness. Thank you for sharing!

