What's our WAG on a timeframe for MVP?

[Marc.2377]

@cwellsx

IMO the technical part is relatively easy and the hardest part might be …

• marketing – overcoming the “network effect” (including PageRank and mind-share)
• money issues – e.g. if you want it fast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle then you’d prefer people work on it full-time
• possibly leadership

That is very much correct.

@cwellsx

I wrote a good bit of the StackOverflow UI just as a programming exercise, last summer, to teach myself React.JS – that’s at https://github.com/cwellsx/react-forum with a link there to a running demo you can look at.

Found that quite interesting!

@cwellsx

I guess that any SO employees who read this will see that this grossly underestimates how much effort, cost, and hardware it takes to operate their current site, given how much data and how much traffic it has.

You bet. I posted a collection of resources on creating SE “clones” on Discord (channel: #programming-general - reproducing here:

1. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/are-there-any-clones-alternatives-for-running-a-stack-exchange-style-qa-site
2. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44637/open-source-php-clone-of-stackoverflow (p.s. read Tyler Carter’s answer)
3. https://www.bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/
4. https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/
5. https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/
6. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-and-technologies-are-used-to-build-the-stack-exchange-network

Make sure to see link #4!

There’s also a collection of resources on SE architecture, stack and infrastructure:

1. https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/12/10/server-hosting-rent-vs-buy/

2. https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/01/12/new-stack-overflow-server-glamour-shots/

3. https://blog.serverfault.com/2010/09/10/1097492931/

4. https://www.dev-metal.com/architecture-stackoverflow/ (2014)

5. http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-update-560m-pageviews-a-month-25-servers-and-i.html

6. https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/

7. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-and-technologies-are-used-to-build-the-stack-exchange-network/10370#10370 (a bit outdated and not clear enough, but references at the end may be useful)

   Additional insights:

8. https://stackoverflow.blog/tags/server/ (a couple of blog posts, most not too much relevant)

9. https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/07/22/how-stack-overflow-upgraded-from-windows-server-2012/

10. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333095/planned-maintenance-scheduled-for-wednesday-september-11-2019-at-100-utc-9-pm (some comments relevant)

11. https://stackexchange.com/performance

@cwellsx

developers might manage additional orthogonal features

To the extent that’ll be possible, that’s the idea. I dedicated a good amount of time getting to know devs and my plan is to allocate “work” in as much of an orthogonal manner as possible. Let’s just get past this end-of-the-year time window and that should start to move much more efficiently.

@cwellsx

If this famous quote were applicable …

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

… then I imagine that simply adding some kind of back-end to my existing “react-forum” could be done within a few weeks (if I were doing it full-time). It’s not like a developer must write a web server, database engine, 3rd-party authentication, etc. – it’s kind of only a matter of choosing the components and configuring them, isn’t it.

More or less. As I imagine you are aware, there’s a wealth of existing SE “clone” or similar implementations, each with their own set of pros/cons. We have, since early on, decided that we will build something that is different in that it lasts. You probably won’t find much disagreement in that the current SE implementation works well. We want to do better. Obviously, I’m not saying “perfection from day zero”, but no, I don’t think we want to launch something to be embarassed about either because that might be our doom.
Now, in the meantime, it appears that one specific existing implementation is being used in an “urgent” fashion for one community (https://writing.codidact.com/). Not sure if it was publicly discussed (or even announced), but there you have it.

@cwellsx

I don’t know Marc, I don’t know how many developers you have or how dedicated they are

Oh, if you plan to contribute, let’s get to know each other, then :) Please join our Discord whenever you have a chance, and ping me. Many (probably most) past 1:1 talks have been over the #tech-lead-communication channel, and they are recorded there so you can refer to them if you like.