There're a lot of sour grapes in this thread about performance and made up metrics, but let's take them at their word:
For a site as seemingly simple as Medium, it may be surprising how much complexity is behind the scenes. It’s just a blog, right? You could probably knock something out using Rails in a couple of days. :)
This hints that there is a lot more functionality being put up behind the scenes in terms of datamining and analysis and whatnot than is apparent from the simple "display an article", which indeed is a trivial Sinatra or Express (not even Rails!) app.
While I agree with the overall thrust of your comment -- that playing armchair architect is sort of proving the author's point -- the post doesn't really even attempt to dispel the notion that their stack is overkill. And, honestly, to me, that would make for the more informative and interesting article -- don't just tell me the package you use for bloom filters, tell me why you need a network daemon for bloom filters!
Sorry it came across as "sour grapes", the spec for the post is describe the components of your stack, why you use them, and challenges you've faced.
In terms of "display an article" I'd encourage you to think about what that entails for a platform like ours, it's actually a pretty interesting problem space: near-WYSIWYG editing across 3 platforms, post model vs. HTML (hint we don't store HTML), operational transforms, version history, typographic treatments, copy/paste normalization, ingestion API, etc. It's not rocket science, but it's deeper than you might think at first blush.
"Sour grapes" was in response to sibling comments here, not the original article!
The additional stuff you mentioned here--all of the annoying fiddly details for editing and whatnot--is exactly what should've been used to justify the stack.
The problem is that all of the extra stack baggage frankly looks really baroque, even with the trickiness of the UX you just hinted at.
Thanks for clarifying and yes, lots of interesting stories to be told around the edges of this post. Some are already written and linked. For example, I'd recommend Why ContentEditable is Terrible by Nick.
https://medium.com/medium-eng/why-contenteditable-is-terribl...
For a site as seemingly simple as Medium, it may be surprising how much complexity is behind the scenes. It’s just a blog, right? You could probably knock something out using Rails in a couple of days. :)
This hints that there is a lot more functionality being put up behind the scenes in terms of datamining and analysis and whatnot than is apparent from the simple "display an article", which indeed is a trivial Sinatra or Express (not even Rails!) app.
If you're not the customer, etc. etc.