Replies Are Back, Improvements Continue

We deployed a change on Saturday which brought the Replies feature back for Web and RSS. We use Replies as much as anyone else so we were not happy when we discovered that it was threatening the overall service and required disabling for maintenance. In addition to bringing back Replies, this deploy also cleaned up some code and fixed some bugs.

For folks who love Twitter and read popular technology blogs like TechCrunch, Friday's comparison to a multi-car pile-up seemed fair. With the Replies tab disabled since Tuesday and a frustrating outage on Thursday morning, it felt like a roadblock for us too.

Last week's emergency repair technique is a symptom not just of increasing activity and growth but of a process, approach, and architecture with room for improvement. Every time we update a component, we take another step toward better performance. There's lots of work ahead but we are moving forward on improvements that address not just service performance but also our implementation process.

We're settling in to our new office space this week—it has a panoramic view of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. For those who don't live in the Bay Area, the Bay Bridge is currently being rebuilt to handle more traffic and to withstand major events like earthquakes. We now have a huge visual reminder outside our office window every day.