[yapc] contact info

[Rocco Caputo]

On Dec 30, 2011, at 01:17, Dan Dascalescu wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 17:55, JT Smith <admin at yapcna.org> wrote:
>> I'm looking for some contact info for people who do very interesting things with Perl that aren't highlighted all that much. I'd like to invite these people to come speak about what they do at YAPC. I'm hoping you can help me get some email addresses. Here are the areas of interest I have:
>> 
>>   - Yahoo! uses Perl for lots of things, or at least used to. I'd like to find out if they still do.
> 
> Yahoo! used Perl for Delicious, but now Delicious was sold to AVOS and they migrated to, I think, PHP.


Yahoo! turned del.icio.us into a mix of PHP (front-end), and C++, Perl, Erlang and Python on the back end.  It was almost entirely entrepreneurial-grade Perl and Mason before that.

The sudden proliferation of languages was a side effect of merging the Yahoo! Bookmarks and MyWeb teams into del.icio.us.  A small, concise team suddenly acquired many new points of view and more management than strictly needed.  The new team divided into small, relatively isolated groups.  Each had the goal of rewriting part of the site atop Yahoo!'s proprietary platforms.  Each group chose its implementation language(s) based on local needs.

Maintaining the results as a holistic system wasn't always pleasant.  It wasn't a total loss, though.  I was blessed with the opportunity to practice C++ and become "functional" in Erlang and Python.

All those proprietary Yahoo! technologies had to be scraped off before Delicious could be transferred to AVOS.  I suspect it was easier to rewrite most (if not all) of it since so much relied on unsharable things.  The back-end engineer who survived Delicious' "sunsetting" liked Python, so it probably ended up that.

-- 
Rocco Caputo <rcaputo at pobox.com>