---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: 'The Reddit Cronicles #1 — Digging the reddit codebase'
author:
  display_name: manu
  login: manu
  email: manu@santoro.tk
  url: http://santoro.tk/blog
author_login: manu
author_email: manu@santoro.tk
author_url: http://santoro.tk/blog
excerpt: I’ve always liked Reddit. In the last week I thought it would be a
  nice idea to run my own instance of reddit. I know, put like this, it seems useless,
  but I have further ideas I cannot tell. Since<p><a href="http://santoro.tk/blog/?p=170">Continue
  reading</a></p>
wordpress_id: 4105
wordpress_url: http://santoro.tk/blog/?p=170
date: '2013-09-04 18:23:23 +0000'
date_gmt: '2013-09-04 16:23:23 +0000'
categories:
- PlanetPOuL
tags: []
comments: []
---
<p>I&#8217;ve always liked <a title="&hearts;" href="http://reddit.com/" >Reddit</a>.</p>
<p>In the last week I thought it would be a nice idea to run my own instance of reddit. I know, put like this, it seems useless, but I have further ideas I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Since <a title="reddit is opensource" href="http://blog.reddit.com/2008/06/reddit-goes-open-source.html" >reddit is opensource</a> I decided I wanted to give a look to its code.</p>
<p>I haven&#8217;t used Python in a while since I took Udacity&#8217;s CS101 and CS253 courses, but reading the <a title="reddit install script" href="https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/install-reddit.sh" >install script</a> I realized that Python was the smallest of problems. Of course.</p>
<p>Reddit is a well-engineered application that relies (as actually Steve Huffman explained in CS253) in some cool software tools like Memcached, Apache Cassandra, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL and Pylons web framework.</p>
<p>I decided it would be a good idea to start studying the codebase by giving a look to software pillars on which reddit is build one by one as a way to widen my knowledge of software tools (what problems they solve and how they work) and to have an idea on how reddit actually works.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t like the idea of running a Reddit instance and actually not being able to&nbsp; properly administer it.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Among the packages installed, I noticed (big names):</p>
<ul>
<li>PostgreSQL</li>
<li>Apache Cassandra</li>
<li>Memcached</li>
<li>SQLAlchemy</li>
<li>NodeJS</li>
<li>RabbitMQ</li>
<li>PyLons</li>
</ul>
<p>Over the next months I&#8217;ll be giving a look to thoose pieces of software, more or less in depth, and I&#8217;ll probably take some notes about it.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Enjoy!</p>