How is WordPress.com made? | Hacker News Reader

How is WordPress.com made?

en.blog.wordpress.com

27 pointskingsidharth14 comments

One interesting thing about how Automattic works is that they don't hire engineers without first going through a trial contract. Instead of the normal interview process where they ask you arbitrary questions, you work on the actual codebase solving real bugs.

This ultimately answers the questions of a) whether or not you can work with PHP and the WordPress code, and b) whether or not you can work and collaborate with the team remotely. If hired, you can then immediately start contributing without much more ramp up time.

This is true. After a person has received and accepted an offer for employment, they work as a member of the Happiness (support) team for three weeks before starting on their own job. When WordPress.com opened, everyone in Automattic (Matt, Ryan, Donncha, myself) got a copy of every support request in email. So the support tour is a part of a long tradition. It's also a good way to learn the ropes according to those who have done it.

I help make WordPress.com. Any questions?

Can you talk a bit about how you scale it? I'm especially interested in if you use a shared filesystem like NFS to keep the blogs.dir consistent across multiple web front ends, or do you use something like fuse on top of mogilefs or HDFS? Do you use varnish? Could you share your config?

Thanks a lot!

A good place to start would be Barry's blog: http://barry.wordpress.com/

Hes not updated it in quite awhile though.

Barry has the strength of ten sysadmins.

We use a different domain for uploaded files. Example: http://andy.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/walkingdesk-e1294433... This way we can direct those requests to services better designed for serving and caching static files. We use NFS for blogs.dir (iirc) but sparingly.

How did buddypress come about?

http://buddypress.org/about/story/

Andy Peatling invented it before joining Automattic.

I'm curious if wordpress devs ever contemplate doing a complete re-write of the codebase. It has one of the worst "architected" codebases of any major open source product out there and even people in #wordpress-dev on freenode make jokes about it occasionally.

Contemplate, sure. Seriously think about, no. It's too hard to make the case that it's an economically viable activity.

I was working on a blog addon service that required adding a small javascript snippet to the page to add a button on the side (like GetSatisfaction or UserVoice) and found that this was possible on almost any service except WordPress.com.

I'm well aware that letting users add js to their sites is a major security issue, but it seems like something that would also have a lot of upsides.

So out of curiosity, how many actual people work on WordPress.com - Matt has gone on a hiring-spree in the past year or two apparently:

http://automattic.com/about/

It used to be only a handful of people and I know the usage stats haven't grown that much.

20 people for all of Automattic in June 2008:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080624032336/http://automattic....

Today there are like 50 people on that page, some of them are for Gravatar and InstantDebate and PollDaddy, so what's the current headcount for wp.com ?

Automattic has around 70 people working full time. I can't keep track. Not everyone works on WordPress.com. Without referring to any records, I'd guess we have a couple dozen on technical, a dozen on support, a handful on design, and a handful on business.

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