Twitter Shuts Down 2FA Shows the Madness that is Software Development
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I’ve been shitting on Musk a lot, but that microservice for 2FA was probably named Luigi or some other dumb shit
I’ll be honest, I can’t keep my eyes off the Twitter drama. Every single day something pops off. I’ve always been a big drama nerd though, I still don’t like Big Ed and Carol Baskins is probably guilty. That being said, Twitter accidentally shutting down 2FA is just a glimpse into the madness that is a software development/engineering. After 3.5 years of development experience, I’ll explain how things like this can easily happen.
What Happened?
The image below pretty much sums it up.
Before I start, I’m making a lot assumptions about how Twitter operates based off readings. I’ve worked in a company that was huge on microservices, so I have a rough idea of how things like this go down, but that doesn’t mean it’s true for Twitter. That being said, let’s dive in.
Today, Elon learned a new word, microservices. Microservices are small, which means they’re easy to turn off. Elon learned that just because it’s easy to turn off, doesn’t mean you should.
What are microservices you might ask? In short, an architectural style that structures applications as a collection of services. Services don’t rely on each other which allows small teams to maintain, deploy and own them.
Since companies live and die by a single architecture pattern, Twitter probably had a large amount of microservices running. However, with having this large amount of services, several get left behind or forgotten about. Similar to AWS resources, millions of dollars are spent in unused applications running. One might think, why not just delete/turn off a service once it’s done being used. My best answer, companies software development cycle is so rapid, that time is never allocated for cleaning up. At first, that doesn’t seem bad, but this can build quickly over time alongside company growth. Finally, some of these services might have been halted…
