And we didn’t connect the iPhone app to PAL because “the mobile platform” was a better aggregation of data from multiple calls into a more flexible collection of objects which better served our purposes then. Some excellent work was done to make that happen by pretty much everyone in the group.

I still remember how fast we could provision and expand at Joyent. Made life much easier in our, er, less than resource efficient stack. We always knew there would come a time when it was more important to consolidate and drive to efficiency; at the time, we were optimized for shipping features and learning.

And regarding JRuby, the folks at http://eng.wealthfront.com/ got it, too. They’re a smart bunch. I’m glad to be with them, though I’ll always miss LED.

I guess this situation with scalability, leads to the point where you have to ask, what is more important knowing my currently deployed stack and understand it or install a random solution and pick 3 metrics which the newer stack does better, and write an article about it. If the second one is cheaper (less engineering effort) do it; no question, this is a strategical decision. However, this does not tell anything in terms of how good that platform is, or how good the new platform at all. I think using better solutions with Rails could have been less effort to fix your performance and scalability (without having numbers I can’t be sure).

The other part is the “what language is better” argument, I guess the scientific comparison of these languages (Ruby and JS) could not find major differences, it just feels wrong to me to write javascript for a backend system when I know that I can express in Ruby the problem way better. I guess there are couple of other languages before I would even think about JS, but again, it is just personal preference. If there was a must situation I would probably use Coffee script, which more concise than JS.

Thanks for this writeup!

Just so you know, Ruby 1.9 is officially also MRI, it was only called YARV during development.

https://plus.google.com/102874503764972429803/posts/SZQR3eKYhWn