Interview with a Pornhub web developer (2019)
Back in the day I did work at a group of one of the largest adult websites.<p>Tech was PhP, MySQL, memcache and similar vanilla stuff running on many Linux servers - pretty simple stuff.<p>The trick was performance. Simple stupid mistakes that would not be detected  in sites that have low traffic become enormous problems in a high traffic server.<p>Pretty much nothing was dynamic and we wrote scripts to create static pages for almost everything except search and authentication.<p>Things like logging just could not be done. It was easier to load a bunch of data in memory on a request and process it instead of running a slightly slower SQL query, since a ton of those could kill the database.<p>And yes, there were no placeholder images or videos. After some time you just get used to it and code. But I have to say you get pretty desensitized to it and when I resigned from that job my life in that area improved quite a lot.<p>Highlights were p*rn stars and random celebs visiting the office - but after some time that got kind of meh.<p>The job itself was just a programming gig and very professional except for the images on the screen which we learned to ignore.<p>On the whole, the guys who ran the thing were a pretty solid and great bunch of people and it was one of the best dev experiences in my long career.