- In terms of technology choice / things that have been more work, it’s worth pointing out that Chorus started about 5 years ago as a way of converting a couple dozen sports blogs that ran on Scoop to a single platform. Rails was very young then, but it made sense then, and I think it still does now. Everything since then has been a very iterative process of adding and refining features that we saw a need for.
That said, Chorus has been steadily growing to become a large project over time. Rails has a lot of facilities that make working on something of this size easier, but, we bump into scaling/configuration issues fairly often. A good example of this is Rails never really anticipated one app to run across 300+ domains, but that’s what we do.
Sure there are things we would do different if we started with a blank slate, but generally these are areas we’ve already identified as technical debt and are either actively working to improve or have plans to do so.
- Whenever we start a new project, the product team takes a good look at the technologies that make the most sense for the job. For example, our new fantasy baseball game, Pick6 uses MongoDB as it’s datastore. In general, all the developers are big Ruby fans though, so that is our go to.
- Yes, the Apache to Nginx switch is one of the many things on our Ops teams board of projects.
Obligatory mention: If this stuff is up your alley, we are hiring designers, developers and ops people: http://jobs.voxmedia.com/
