Larissa Meek, former interviewee, bikini model, and etc, has joined the Devlounge team. Watch for her first article sometime in August. If you are interested, she recently wrote an article for that other site (Vitamin) titled Web Design-isms: 7 Surefire Styles that Work. Be sure to give it a read if you haven’t yet. We’re excited to have her as part of team, and it is just another addition in many we hope to continue to make throughout the summer to improve content and content flow.
The Digg Crew
The much anticipated interview with various members of the Digg staff team is finally here! We thank the ever busy development team for taking the time to give us some responses.
Q: What’s the best part of working for a young company? Is it the same as an everyday job, or is it more fun to be part of such a highly successful site?
The Digg team is still relatively small, but we are completely focused on developing new features for our users..and yes, it’s a blast to work for a company like Digg because we have such a loyal following and close relationship with the community.
Q: On a hosting / tech specs related question, how do you estimate or determine the amount of bandwidth you’ll need each month to run such a high traffic site?
We grew fairly quickly right out of the gate, so before too long one server became two servers, myisam become innodb, we moved to Debian then we went to three servers, Apache 2.x, mysql master-slave replication, started using memcached, moved to PHP 5.x, hired a dba. And then the pace picked up yet again. We try to account for 1,000 requests per second at high points in the day for traffic.
Q: How likely is it that you will be going strong and still run by the same people in the next 5 – 10 years? Is selling to another company something that you see in the near future?
We just recently closed a 2nd round of funding, and are completely devoted to focusing on growing the site internally into something that will continue to offer users the best social experience on the Net.
Q: What’s it like knowing that everything you do front-end wise is going to have both positive and negative feedback from the hardcore users? Do you take a lot of the feature and design suggestions to heart?
We always listen to the users, and check every email that comes to the feedback address. It might take some time for us to get everything that’s requested rolled out, but that’s because we want to do it right.
Q: How long will it be before the Digg API is released?
Soon, very soon.
Q: Are there any plans for allowing users to register as “owners” of a particular URL (similar to how a user can register as the owner of a blog at technorati) and to allow them to “adjust” poorly chosen (or sometimes blatantly false) titles and descriptions that link to their content?
We don’t have any plans along those lines at this time, but I would add that Digg currently provides users with a variety of tools to report inaccurate content on the site. With these tools, Digg empowers its more than one million users as editors of content on the site.
Q: Care to shed some light on any future plans and what we should be looking out for from Digg in the coming months / year?
Stay tuned. As always, Digg will continue to innovate and offer cool new features. Also, please come out to the Digg user celebration party at Mezzanine in San Francisco on April 19th.
Many new introductions
In just two days, the Devlounge staff team has nearly doubled! We’ve managed to yield in five new contributors, each with extended knowledge in some of the fields we have yet to do much talking about here on Devlounge – PHP & Ruby and AJAX & Javascript. Each of them are looking forward to contributing some killer content you won’t find anywhere else. We are happy to have them aboard. Please welcome Satish, Rick, Nic, Matt, and Dibya. We’re really reaching out with our global author set as well 🙂
To check out their homepages, visit the Authors Index.
