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Hotjar offers free website analytics so they have a challenging mission: handle hundreds of millions of requests per day from mostly free users. Marc von Brockdorff, Co-Founder & Director of Engineering at Hotjar, summarized the lessons they've learned in: 9 Lessons Learned Scaling Hotjar's Tech Architecture
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Which cloud should you use? It may depend on what you need to do with it. What Zach Bjornson needs to do is process large amounts scientific data as fast as possible, which means reading data into memory as fast as possible. So, he made benchmark using Google's
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Achieving very low latencies takes special engineering, but if you are a SaaS company latencies of a few hundred milliseconds are possible for complex business logic using standard technologies like load balancers, queues, JVMs, and rest APIs. Itai Frenkel, a software engineer at Forter, which provides a Fraud Prevention Decision
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Instagram has always been generous in sharing their accumulated wisdom. Just take a look at the Related Articles section of this post to see how generous. The tradition continues. Mike Krieger, Instagram co-founder, wrote a really good article on lessons learned from milestones achieved during Five Years of Building Instagram.
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Endings are often a time for reflection and from reflection often comes wisdom. That is the case for Kellan Elliott-McCrea, who recently announced he was leaving his job after five successful years as the CTO of Etsy. Kellan wrote a rather remarkable going away post: Five years, building a culture,
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Daniel Bryant gave an energetic talk at Devoxx UK 2015 on lessons learned from over five years of experience with microservice based projects. The talk: The Seven Deadly Sins of Microservices: Redux (video, slides). If you don't want to risk your immortal API then be sure to avoid:
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A world that wants full stack developers also needs full stack tuners. That tuning process, or at least the outline of a full stack tuning process is something Ronald Bradford describes in not quite enough detail in Improving performance – A full stack problem. The general philosophy is: * Understanding were to
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Within one week Ello went from thousands of sessions a day to a few million sessions a day. Mike Pack wrote a great article sharing what they’ve learned: 5 Early Lessons from Rapid, High Availability Scaling with Rails. Some of their scaling challenges: quantity of data, team size, DNS,
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Alexey Migutsky in 2 years with Angular has a lot to say about Angular, which I can't comment on at all, not being an Angular user. But burried in his article are some lessons for building better frameworks that obviously come from deep experience. Frameworks will always suck,
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If you need a good overview of different ways to setup your web service then Mitchell Anicas has written a good article for you: 5 Common Server Setups For Your Web Application. We've even included a few additional possibilities at no extra cost. 1. Everything on One Server.
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While Ten Caching Mistakes that Break your App by Omar Al Zabir is a few years old, it is still a great source of advice on using caches, especially on the differences between using a local in-memory cache and when using a distributed cache. Here are the top 10 mistakes
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Arvid Norberg on the libtorrent blog has put together an excellent list of principles of high performance programs, obviously derived from hard won experience programming on bittorrent: Two fundamental causes of performance problems: 1. Memory Latency. A big performance problem on modern computers is the latency of SDRAM. The CPU
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Adrian Singer has boiled down 7 years of experience to a set of 10 very useful tips on how to best optimize NGINX and PHP-fpm for high traffic sites: 1. Switch from TCP to UNIX domain sockets. When communicating to processes on the same machine UNIX sockets have better performance
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Ever come to a point where you feel you've learned enough to share your experiences in the hopes of helping others traveling the same road? That's what Martin Kleppmann has done in an lovingly written Six things I wish we had known about scaling, an article
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Matthew Might, as a first responder to a surprise traffic surge on his inexpensive linode hosted blog, took emergency steps that you might find useful in a similar situation: 1. Find the bottleneck. Reloading the page in firebug showed the first page took 24 seconds to load and after that
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Inspired by a xkcd comic, Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google and all around interesting and nice guy, has created an above par code kata involving a regex program that demonstrates the core inner loop of many successful systems profiled on HighScalability. The original code is at xkcd 1313: