Rube Goldberg 2.0

I just voted up a link on reddit. The link doesn’t matter, but it started me thinking about the chain of events that followed it.

First, a bit of javascript submits some information back to reddit’s server. The python code receiving reddit stores this.

At some point later, some ruby code running on my slicehost requests a json file from reddit. The python serves this up, the ruby fetches it, parses it and hands it off to delicious.com, where a mix of php and C++ (I think) stores it in their backend.

At some point later a php script running on my blog fetches that data from delicious. It dumps it into a MySQL database.

At some point later still, someone comes along to my website. They see a link to the thing I voted up on reddit, served up by php.

Alternative titles: “Polyglotism now!”, “…except for too much indirection”, “He Knows The Unix Way”.

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One thought on “Rube Goldberg 2.0

  1. david Post author

    Of course one downside of this is that there’s a huge time delay for stuff appearing in the life stream – as much as half an hour.

    Gourmand updates from its sites every 15 minutes (not inherent, just my cron settings). lifestream regenerates every 15 minutes. supercache expires every 5. If the timings go wrong (and I think they do at the moment) it takes 35 minutes for stuff to percolate through.

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