Raffi Krikorian, Senior Director of the Platform Services group, Twitter

At @twittereng, @raffi is Senior Director of the Applications Services group, the custodians of Twitter's core logic and application infrastructure → his teams manage, amongst other things, the business logic, scalable delivery, APIs, and authentication of Twitter's application. His group, from the @twittereng side, helped create the iOS 5 Twitter integration as well as the ""The X Factor"" + Twitter voting mechanism. Previously, he was the lead of the public APIs as well as being the one of those behind Twitter's Geospatial APIs.

Before Twitter he used to create technologies to help people frame their personal energy consumption against global energy production (Wattzon - Business Week's ""Best Idea"" 2008), and also ran a consulting company building off-the-wall projects. At one point, he used to teach at NYU’s ITP (created the class Every Bit You Make) and spent way too much time as a student at MIT and the MIT Media Lab (Internet 0 - Scientific American September 2004).

Presentation: "Timelines at Scale"

Track: Architectures you've always wondered about

Time: Friday 16:00 - 16:50

Location: Grand Ballroom A

Abstract:

With hundreds of millions of users, Twitter operates one of the world's largest timeline delivery systems. At steady state, Twitter receives thousands of events a second whether it be tweets, social graph mutations, and direct messages -- these need to be delivered to disks, in-memory timelines, email, and mobile devices. Building, managing, and debugging this infrastructure is one of Twitter engineering's biggest challenges. In this session, we will dive into these paths to understand the architecture, as well as talk about some of the tools that Twitter uses to manage and understand these paths.