

Ask HN: How complex is what you are working on? - heelhook

On a scale from 0 to 10, how complex would you say is the project you are working on? (0 being a hello world) Why?<p>Note: By <i>project</i> I mean, the entire project, not just what <i>you</i> are working on, but also what other team mates are doing.
======
triggit
Some of the most complex projects are also the least sexy.

At Triggit we are building technology around how to buy digital media. What
does this mean? It means a start-up with less then 20 people evaluates over 12
billion ad impressions, across hundreds of millions of user records, every
day. Since we bid and buy these ads in in Real Time we get less then 100
milliseconds to leverage the data provided by the sellers (people like
google), the data provided by our clients (advertisers), internal data, and
3rd party data to dynamically evaluate and bid on inventory. We look at about
150,000 queries per second with hundreds of different bidders. Because of
latency restraints and load balancing issues we can't work in the cloud, which
means we must coordinate this entire effort across four data centers on three
continents.

We legitimately deal with big data - so much data that its not worth storing
the vast majority of it. Hadoop sort of keeps up, Hbase breaks regularly and
the guys at MapR are up to some pretty cool stuff.

Who said an online advertising start-up couldn't be interesting :) Check it
out at triggit.com.

------
byoung2
8, on a logarithmic scale. Our web app uses 100 EC2 servers doing data
aggregation, a recommendation engine written in Java, a cms using Drupal, an
API written in PHP, and a front end using JSrender. We're using Mule for
eventing, APE for push notifications, and pretty much every AWS service there
is.

~~~
AznHisoka
what web app is this, very curious

------
bri3d
You've supplied the low-end of the spectrum (hello world) but not the high-
end.

Asking people to describe the "complexity" of their product also seems to
invite bragging about over-engineering - I _could_ make my blog require 3
datastores and a message queue (this seems to be popular in some circles), and
then post about how I'm solving complex problems and you should come work for
me.

For what it's worth, I'd describe what I work on right now as quite
complicated from a UI/UX and "number of inputs" standpoint, but quite simple
technically - so I guess it falls somewhere in the middle in terms of
"complexity?"

------
petervandijck
I'd say a 6. The project itself is a 2, add 2 for technical constraints and 2
for partner constraints.

------
chris_dcosta
I'd say 4 but to me it feels like 11 ;)

Just don't have enough time, money, or knowledge, and could do with some help
actually!

------
rg81
What would 10 be? I need some more context before I can attempt to answer this
question.

~~~
heelhook
Right, 10 would be the most complex software you can think of related to what
you are working on. What in layman terms could be referred to as "rocket
science".

------
gdhillon
I would say around 8 because of NLP usage and complex algorithms. Checkout
<http://diglig.com>

~~~
glimcat
It isn't very clear from how you get from text mining to tasks.

