"built a new system—known as a software “framework,” in engineering speak"<p>Hearing the words "engineering speak" bothers me. Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right?<p>Saying just software framework would have probably been fine. Humans are pretty good at inferring the meaning of words from context...
I had the same problem with Japanese folks. We had our system working all over the World except Japan, where it would crash every morning. Turns out the folks in Japan come in to work and at exactly 8:00AM they shout "HAI" hit login button. All of them. At the same time. A login buffer size of 4 was not enough to handle that ;-)
Twitter's engineering blog posted about this phenomenon last year.[1] It's not as in-depth as I'd like, but it does contain some technical/architectural details about how they scaled to deal with such high traffic.<p>1. <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how" rel="nofollow">https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-a...</a>
Didn't read the article, but I did grep it for unicode and utf-8 and found no matches, so this might also be related.<p>Twitter lets you tweet 140 characters regardless of the bit width of those characters in. For Japanese, I think almost all characters take two bytes in utf-8. As such, given the same number of tweets, the bandwidth usage is approx 2X.<p>Twitter also seems much more useful in ideogram languages as 140 characters = 140 words = an article. In English, 140 characters = a short/medium sized sentence.
The 'no downtime' thing really rings true with me .. during my personal time working in Japan I found I'd become accustomed to the fact that it was just 'normal' to be going into the office after a few beers and working another shift .. to the point where, when I returned to California, it was really bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home and - except for a few hardcore hackers - life just seeped out of the office space(s) we called a workplace. I guess the different physical characteristics of the two locations has a lot to do with it, not to mention culture - back home (at the time) in California it was not at all weird to be spending up to two hours on the commute, just sitting on the freeways in ones car, completely alone tuned into whatever bland offerings the radio waves proferred, while in Japan I don't think I had a car-ride longer than 30 minutes the whole time I was there (airport lift) .. and there is something to be said for the vital 'energy' that imbues a place like Tokyo at 9pm in the evening on a Tuesday, where most of the world is still at work. Albeit drunk, at least in a good mood, but nevertheless: still working. I got used to heading out at 10pm on any workday and feeling really <i>alive</i> out there in the walking streets, like there wasn't a "shutdown" period before 12am.<p>The takeaway of this article to me is that, to be truly successful in the International markets of the new electronic economies, one really does have to disavow oneself of cultural baggage. I think I get better at that as the years go by - but I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old California associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still spend a really inordinate amount of time on the freeway. Oh, how impersonal that life was ..
As a Scala enthusiast, it's neat to see one of my pet languages get press, but...a "software engineering technology called Scala"? Did you mean "programming language"?