
How Node.js has revolutionised the Mail Online (Worlds No.1 Online Newspaper) - darsee
http://www.nearform.com/nodecrunch/how-node-js-has-revolutionized-the-mailonline#.UpMzaWTfw2E
======
UK-AL
I think programmers these days focus too much on having whizz bang
technologies.

90% of successful project implementation is culture, good practices and so
forth.

I've seen well run cobol projects, and badly run projects using all the latest
trends.

It doesn't really matter if your software is using Java, ruby or node.js. I
can guarantee you from a business perspective, success does not rely on that.
I much rather have well tested, well maintained Java Spring Code base, then a
badly tested, unreadable clojure codebase.

The success of the story is that they probably went from a bad codebase to a
good one. And you can in any language, node.js or not.

~~~
babuskov
I wish I could upvote this more than once.

Except maybe for the 4th paragraph. Using node.js instead of PHP cut my server
costs to 20% of what it was before (simply because I can run the same thing on
less number of cheaper servers). Lower cost means more profit and I count
profit under "success from business perpective". ;)

~~~
alan_cx
Sure, but if you don't get that "90%" right first, your "20%" becomes
irrelevant. Too many don't get the "90%" right.

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hipsters_unite
This is a fascinating article, but I can't help thinking that I wish they were
more technically incompetent so it harmed their business. The Daily Mail has
to be one of the most repugnant media organizations and if there is ever a
justification for using the word 'evil' in relation to an institution then
they are it.

~~~
enko
> The Daily Mail has to be one of the most repugnant media organizations

Hm, I don't know. I sort of respect them, in a way. In some ways I think of
them as the authentic voice of the impotent lower middle classes, lashing out
at everything around them, greedy, cynical, childish and shallow, blaming
others, ever seeking some outraged scandal to distract them from their
otherwise mundane lives. Hate the Mail if you will, but you're basically
hating their audience too.

I don't like the Mail, but at least they're independent, seemingly serving no-
one's agenda but their own. Murdoch is much worse, in my opinion.

~~~
hipsters_unite
I hate the Mail because it encourages the worst in its audience. I have to
believe that if the people that read it and I could reach a compromise if we
weren't being so polarized by their reading material.

Being "greedy, cynical, childish and shallow, blaming others" are all vices at
the end of the day (FYI despite the tone of my comment here, I'm actually not
religious).

I agree totally that Murdoch is worse, but I think the Mail does hold more
sway in a vocal area of the population with political power. The fact that
they never acknowledge their hypocrisy or the damage they do I think is also
offensive on an intellectual level that the Sun et al never quite reach as
they're so cartoon-like.

~~~
enko
I agree with everything you wrote. But the problem is, what can anyone do to
fix it?

I mean it's easy to come up with a plan to "fix" Murdoch. Simply tighten media
ownership rules, so that one family or organisation can't own more than a
certain small percentage of media. And I take your point that the Sun is
pretty clownish in the UK, but in Australia they're far more insidious. (¶)

But how do you fix the Mail? They're like this perfect endgame of free press.
There's no big conspiracy; they're simply the answer to the question: "what
does the angry disenfranchised demographic want to read about?". And while I
lament the means by which said class seeks to assuage its anger, I do
sympathise that they have a lot to be angry about.

All this is why I find it hard to wrestle with the question of the Mail. I
_want_ to hate them, but some part of me holds back, because I feel that's too
close to simple class discrimination, and because I can't shake the feeling
that they're the symptom, not the cause, of society's ills.

(¶) Check out the Murdoch press's outrageous bias in the recent Australian
election:
[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/05/daily-t...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/05/daily-
telegraph-election-australia)

------
anu_gupta
My hosts file always contains this entry:

127.0.0.1 dailymail.co.uk www.dailymail.co.uk

This ensures that there is no possibility of my giving any traffic to this
utterly repugnant shitfest of a newspaper.

I would encourage everyone to do the same.

------
spindritf
Excellent submission. I wish it went into some more detail on how they
integrate those mini apps into the site or handle their failure but it was
probably already long enough.

This

 _a Table also rebuilt the entire legacy Java frontend replacing the entire
155,000 lines of have with about 4000 lines of Clojure_

was particularly impressive since a Table is just a small team of up to six
people.

I also skimmed the front page of
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk](http://www.dailymail.co.uk) and don't understand
the allergic reactions in the comments here. A guy built a hobbit hut, some
celebrity gossip, sports, more gossip... rather unremarkable.

For a website this big (32k pixels according to the article) it does load
pretty quickly. Faster than a product page on Amazon (at least for me from
Central Europe).

~~~
alan_cx
There is a difference between the Daily Mail newspaper, which is a scare
mongering right wing hate rag which has as much relation to truth and news as
say Fox News, and its website which is pretty much a celeb stuff and sort of a
soft porn peddler.

Its a weird pairing under the same brand. I don't _know_ , but I don't think
there is much crossover between the users of the paper and website.
Personally, I find both hideous, but Im at a loss to accept that some one who
gets all up set about gay marriage, immigrants, and the alleged loss of
Englishness, what ever that is or was, is in any way interested in a
Kardashian thing.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
It's very difficult to hold any extreme view - right or left - without begin
hypocritical[1]. The DM just excels at it.

[1] And, at an individual level, without encouraging the trashier elements of
the media to expend enormous amounts of energy to expose those hypocrisies,
however significant.

~~~
alan_cx
Well, sort of, the web site is the newspaper's hypocrisy. No?

You are correct, the DM does excel at what it does. On the face of it, the
impression I get is that the paper does have a consistent vibe. I mean, I
despise its views, but I do have to admit that it is very good at what it
does. It is fairly rock solid in its opinions and politics. I would use lots
of words to slag the paper off, but I don't think hypocrisy is one of them.
But then maybe, people who read it, for either pleasure or pain, may well have
many examples of hypocrisy.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I don't read it, but I am aware of a) its rabid obsession with pedophiles b)
it's 'sidebar of shame' which frequently features very young women in various
states of undress. That, I call hypocrisy.

------
JunkDNA
>Enter Fred George (of Programmer Anarchy fame). Fred came on board as Chief
Architect, and focused on supporting the organisational move from traditional
enterprise technology team to a nimbler, highly skilled organisation built
around a strong culture of personal responsibility and trust.

I think all the other details in this write-up are not as important as this.
The specific tech choice isn't the driver, it is this cultural shift. This
doesn't mean the tech choice doesn't matter though. In fact, I would argue
that the most rapid way to build such a culture in your organization is to
self-select for people who would do well in that environment. I hate painting
people with too broad a brush, but my experience has been that choosing safe,
established technologies as your stack will cause the sort of people who like
safe, predictable work to show up for jobs. It can be hard (though certainly
not impossible) to recruit the alpha geeks and the people with a more
entrepreneurial perspective. There are plenty of super-talented people who
have very pedestrian technologies as their preferred platforms. But if you're
looking to mix things up quickly and go for a more nontraditional environment,
the shortcut to getting that is to choose tech that is beloved by people who
primarily want to work in a nontraditional manner. The sort of person who
dabbles with go or node in their spare time does it not because they expect
that it's going to be their meal ticket to a cushy job doing software
development at a bank somewhere. They do it because they have got intrinsic
motivation to learn new things and be on the cusp of the latest tech out of
sheer enjoyment.

------
barrkel
_it’s not possible to serve a 32,000 pixel webpage to a mobile device_

I reject this prejudice.

The biggest annoyance I have with browsing websites on mobile devices is that
they _nearly always disable zoom_.

Zoom is the probably the single easiest way to navigate large documents,
because it lets the user scale effective panning speed. Without zoom, you're
forced to pan at a fixed speed, and if the document is very long, it takes
forever. But if you can zoom out, you can pan much much faster, and focus in
on interesting bits of content much more easily. Many many times I've given up
on websites because I wasn't able to get to the desktop view on my phone.

As to the infeasibility of a 32k page? The Nexus 7 tablet has the same
resolution as my 24" main monitor. My phone isn't far behind. If anything, the
question should be if 32k pages are infeasible for desktop machines, not
mobiles.

------
nodata
Worlds (sic.) number 1 online newspaper? Riight.
[http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/](http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/)

~~~
nailer
They're not claiming to be the most ethical or nice paper, just number one in
terms of readership. Which, like it or not, they are.

~~~
nodata
The world's number one newspaper in terms of readership? Show me the numbers!

~~~
nailer
"Mail Online close to 100m users"

"Associated Newspapers network remains world's most popular newspaper website
with more than 99m monthly browsers"

This is published by the Guardian, the Mail's left wing equivalent.

[http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/23/mail-online-
clo...](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/23/mail-online-close-
to-100m-users)

~~~
nodata
_the Guardian, the Mail 's left wing equivalent_

Ouch!

------
petercooper
_The entire backlog of 1.2 million articles are stored in elastic-search,
which is used to drive the site_

Elasticsearch is awesome and I'd heard rumors of people using it as a data
store rather than just a search index but it's awesome to see it being used as
a data store at such scale.

~~~
lost_my_pwd
At the last place I worked, we used ES for both search and storage of 2.5MM+,
and quickly growing, items (the data was also stored in DynamoDB for safety).
It worked quite well, saved us some development time, and reduced the latency
of search requests a little since there was no 2nd network call to fetch the
documents found by ES from separate storage.

~~~
petercooper
What are the basic tradeoffs at that scale? I'm only using it for search at a
very low scale but it almost sounds like a dream database if it works well at
scale and for canonical storage.

------
whizzbang
It's a interesting presentation but can anyone tell me why you would build an
analytics tool and an advertising tool when there are already tools out there
to do this? (Chartbeat, Doubleclick, etc...)

Maybe there have very specific use cases or have grown to the point were it
makes economic sense to rebuild these but seems a bit redundant.

------
CmonDev
"From a content management perspective, writing code in a very functional way
is very low friction vs traditional OO models of building content management
systems". It sounds like "using letters is very low friction vs using
numbers". A new silver bullet/hammer?

PS: I like functional programming a lot.

~~~
coldtea
> _It sounds like "using letters is very low friction vs using numbers"._

No, it sounds like "using flexible, isolated, easily changable functional
components and avoiding side-efects" is very low friction vs "designing and
creating an OO class hierarchy, with all the tedium it entails in most common
languages".

~~~
CmonDev
I think I misunderstood him but it did sound like OOP vs functional :). What
he meant was probably something like "we stopped writing bad code with lots of
mutable state and caught up with modern best-practices in OOP".

------
UK-AL
A lot of this personal responsibility, freedom to make choices stuff sounds
like a system to place blame on individuals, instead of fixing the system.

------
dodyg
You don't read the Daily Mail, you look at pictures. They put tons of pictures
whenever event happens.

