Placing all the blame on Cassandra helps Digg justify letting go the VP, since he was allegedly the guy who pushed it.

So what's the digg story here?

I get that some VP suggested a new buzzwordy technology, they gave him enough rope to hang himself and he did and left the company with a broken pile of crap. It could happen, if you have a healthy company you give trust to people. That it got this far doesn't speak well of the rest of management. It doesn't speak really well of the rest of the team either. Shouldn't there have been some circuit breakers or something?

Digg isn't a poor, bring-your-own-laptop startup. They've got resources, they've had substantial investment. They can afford to build and test software and I know of no real marketing reason they had to push something untested out. Rose could go out and say it wasn't done, it's going to take more time.

How does Rose keep his job? Wasn't he this VP's boss?

And it's single technology? That couldn't have been vetted and tested independently of all of digg? Really? And MongoDB, or hadoop, or one of the dozens of other nosqls wouldn't work, either? You do what you have to do and there is never a 'truth' with VPs and CxOs are canned, but it all doesn't float with me, just looks like another over valued and under talented company, got lucky and the blind squirrel found the nut, there isn't gonna be a second act.

Maybe it just seems low brow to me, name and finger the guy, blame the opensource tool you use, never explain or elaborate why you launched anyways when you were fixing bugs in the tool at the 11th hour.

I'm sure the real story is different. My rough guess at it is

* the main marketing tool that digg has left is "Kevin Rose as genius"

* Kevin and the people he drinks with pushed for the adoption of new cool technology.

* the entire thing was a giant clusterfuck because of Kevin and the people he drinks with.

* but once that became obvious there was a need for a scapegoat so that digg could keep its primary marketing tool.

That reads like sour grapes.

That doesn't necessarily make it wrong, either:-)

Perhaps, though I think my sour grapes specifically about digg are somewhat dead. What really makes me angry is the joke that is the VC industry, which is really the root cause of this. In April I talked to an associate at Andreesen-Horowitz (where Kevin Rose is the mayor on foursquare), who said that digg, after many difficulties, was on the right track. From their perspective, engineers are cogs in the machine and the only thing that matters are executives. I worked closely with the executives at digg, and they spent the vast majority of the time feathering their nests, and the digg v4 rollout is just the logical conclusion of them draining value for five years.

Also I said this was a "rough guess." Comments on TC from people I know who worked there (there's been a mass exodus for the last two years) suggest I'm mostly correct.

Finally, I think "sour grapes" is a poor rejoinder. Especially since it's the standard PR line at digg.

Reads like "industry experience" to me.

Perhaps it's both?

Never said I supported it. If my comment came across that way, I apologize.

No, I apologize. I didn't mean to sound like I was attacking you or suggest that you supported it. It just seemed like a good place to interject. It's such a transparent move on Digg's part.

Reminds me of the way NASA blamed lisp back in the day

Part of the reason that Cassandra may be the focus is that Kevin Rose places much of the stability problems on Cassandra's shoulders. Two or three minutes into the most recent diggnation he talks about Cassandra and describes Cassandra as "very beta-stage software" and says how days before the launch at least some of their focus was on fixing "Cassandra problems" rather than issues with Digg v4.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/kevin-rose-responds-to-digg...

If true, it's a lame excuse: blame should be placed on the people that decided to use the beta software to power their very-important-to-their-paycheck website

So if you watch the Revision3 video where they talk about the stability issues Kevin throws Cassandra out there nothing really specific but when discussing downtime its the only technical factor he mentions.

He calls it "still beta software" and states they were fixing bugs in Cassandra during the days leading up to the release of v4.

In reply to you and epoxy, sounds like a gross failure of engineering management. If you're having problems of this sort of foundational nature a few days before the planned release, it strongly suggests you should delay and figure out what's generally gone wrong with the project.

as far as I remember: yes they were using it on v3 too, for some things

About a year ago, they were using it to store a list of friends of viewing user who dugg the viewing news.

original blog post: http://about.digg.com/blog/looking-future-cassandra

Treads on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813528