The teams that engineer LinkedIn’s features
Last week, you heard me chat with Chris Richman, Product Manager, with recent feature updates to LinkedIn’s Communication system. This week, I had a chance to chat with our Director of Engineering for the Content Distribution Network (CDN) group, Ruslan Belkin. Hopefully, the interview will give you a better picture of the internal workings of our engineering teams, one of which Ruslan leads. So, check out the short 3:14 minutes conversation I had with Ruslan, followed by a quick summary.
If you haven’t seen the video and don’t plan on doing so, I thought I’ll summarize some of the key areas Ruslan and I chatted about. Actually, here are the three topics we discussed:
1. What does Ruslan’s team work on?
The CDN group is responsible for the following components of LinkedIn’s communication system: member affiliation networks (connections and groups), invitations, the network updates and other feeds, the communication platform, contacts management and geography location search.
2. Product/Engineering collaboration:
Within the group we have a number of what we call Product/Engineering tracks: networks track, communication platform track, and the contacts management track. Each track has an engineering lead and a counterpart on the Product side with respective feature and infrastructure projects. Feature releases are typically every two weeks.
3. What’s the engineering environment like?
Flexible: You will work in an agile development environment where results of your work will be visible to millions of LinkedIn users (currently there are more than 15 million LinkedIn users) very rapidly and this could be very rewarding for any engineer
Problem Solving: You will be faced with challenges of scale (huge data sets, stringent performance requirements, the need for high quality secure software to protect our customers) and will be exposed to innovative architectural solutions implemented on a large scale: asynchronous communication, caching, data replication.
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Have ideas, feedback, suggestions or questions? As you heard Ruslan say during the interview, the three best ways to reach us:
a. Contact the community guy; that’d be me. Email: msundar@linkedin.com
b. Either pose questions or answer questions on LinkedIn Answers. In particular, the "Using LinkedIn" category
c. Leave a comment at the end of this blog post
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Eugenio La Mesa October 17th, 2007
I really like LinkedIN and I use a lot, but I have a question for a problem I just had:
I was adding another invitation, and I got this warning:
“If enough recipients of your invitations indicate they don’t know you, then we require you to enter an email address to invite other LinkedIn users.
This safeguard is in place to protect users from receiving invitations from people they don’t know.
Customer Service can remove the restriction at any time, once you’veindicated that you understand this policy.”
Since I’m very carefull about people I invite,
can you please tell me why I have this warning?
I’v checked “sent invitations”, and only 3 people
sayed don’t know (and I have 168 accepted), probably
people I met some years ago and the don’t remember me.
Customer service (KMM1761260I88L0KM) told me that it is just a warning, there is a limit of 5.
But 5 is low!
It should be not only absolute (5), but
also relative (a percentage).
After 6 months, I have 3 don’t know,
and sooner or later I’ll reach the 5 limit.
But, if you think as a %, I have 3 don’t know
compared to 168 good contacts, that is 1,7%.
It would be very different if I had, for example,
only 20 contacts, because in this case it
would be 15%.
I have many contacts in my crm (at least 300)
that I would like to find and contact in linkedIN,
but now I’m very scared and I don’t know what to do,
because I don’t want that for good contacts
I have to type the email adrress(and I know the business email, not the personal address every one has in LinkedIN,
so it will probably create a duplicate).
Please give this feedback to someone internally
who can evalute and decide to change this rule,
because it will a problem for many people, not only me.
My 2 cents.
Eugenio
ASB October 21st, 2007
There are a number of features I would love to see implemented in LinkedIn that would be a great value to a large percentage of the userbase.
I’ve outlined some of them here: http://home.asbzone.com/ASB/archive/2007/09/03/what-i-need-from-linkedin.aspx
How many other groups, besides the CDN group, are responsible for managing and implementing the technology behind LinkedIn?
Prasanna February 29th, 2008
This is Prasanna !! I was an active linkedin user from 2 years.. am a student working for a tier 1 supplier for BMW .. Here are my suggestions for the linkedin groups.
I personally was really thinking of how to make the groups active . I made a get together for an international conference it workd out but not upto my expectations! Yes, there is only one means of communicating ofcourse was though emails.But my suggestions would be if there was another webpage dedicated to groups that has all the Forums discussions & any conferences or travellings would give a good edge and also wud be a great application for means of easy communication!!!! As you know it is obvious that there are 1000’s of groups created .. and it makes no sense until its being used and implemented… Business dealings, conferences, lunch get togethers.. any event can grow up an organization you never know!!