Google TechTalks
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2008–2013
52:41 · 30K views · Oct 9, 2007
Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.
HN recommends it as a rich, concrete look at real-world system design and as evidence of YouTube's early Python stack.
3 comments from Hacker News
Hi, I think this is a hard one without working on a big project with senior people. I struggled with this for years and still do but have gotten a little better thanks to senior developers guiding me. I think besides reading books and attending lectures or listening in on talks online, I think you need to find a problem sizable enough and build it from scratch. My work with senior guys has shown me that designing on paper and the white board is essential to tackling the problem for understanding and eventually building it. The patterns will reveal themselves as you go through this exercise if any patterns are needed at all, and I think this is something you definitely will not learn overnight but overtime by getting your hands dirty. If you have not visited this site infoq.com, please do so. It has tons of experts speaking on it. I have been able to incorporate some of what I have learned from here to the job. A quick link to how YouTube was built: this video Really good talk with lots of jewels. Another good book for you: [LINK] Hope this helps.
Here is a better video with the same subject: this video Amazing to see how small the team was before Google acquisition: 2 sysadmin 2 scalability software architects 2 feature developers 2 network engineers 1 DBA
my primary reference that it has always been python is this video from 2007 which was only shortly after they were acquired. this video