Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.
Strategy
If you are an insect, don't work at TripAdvisor, specialization is out. One of the most commented on strategies from the TripAdvisor architecture article is their rather opinionated take on the role of engineers in the organization. Typically engineers live in a box. They are specialized, they do
hot links
Submitted for your scaling pleasure: * Twitterers tweet 200 million tweets a day. Popular topics are eclectic, ranging from Swine Flu to Rebecca Black. Twitter has a really cool video on the global flow of tweets in the world. Worth watching. It looks like a rainbow arcing across the northern hemisphere.
Strategy
Like a digital SWAT team that implodes the wrong door on a raid, the FBI seized multiple racks of computers from DigitalOne, these racks host websites from many clients that just happened to be in the same racks as whomever they are investigating. Downed sites include Instapaper, Curbed Network, and
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Who's Hiring? * BioWare Austin is looking for a Performance Test Engineer for our Austin team. To apply, please visit http://www.bioware.com/careers/austin. * BioWare Austin is looking for a Contract Build Engineer for our Austin team. To apply, please visit http://www.bioware.com/careers/austin.
Example
This is a guest post by Andy Gelfond, VP of Engineering for TripAdvisor. Andy has been with TripAdvisor for six and a half years, wrote a lot of code in the earlier days, and has been building and running a first class engineering and operations team that is responsible for
hot links
Submitted for your scaling pleasure: * Achievements: * Watson uses 10,000's of watts, the computer between the ears uses 20. With only 200 million pages and 2TB of data, Watson is BigInsights, not BigData. * That Google is pretty big: 1 billion unique monthly visitors * tweetimages: We peaked at 22m
Strategy
Planning your next buildout and thinking SSDs are still far in the future? Still too expensive, too low density. Hard disks are cheap, familiar, and store lots of stuff. In this short and entertaining video Wikia's Artur Bergman wants to change your mind about SSDs. SSDs are for
nosql
We've asked What The Heck Are You Actually Using NoSQL For?. We've asked 101 Questions To Ask When Considering A NoSQL Database. We've even had a webinar What Should I Do? Choosing SQL, NoSQL or Both for Scalable Web Applications. Now we get to
Submitted for your scaling pleasure: * Google's code base receives 20+ code changes per minute and 50% of the files change every month. Learn how they test all that. Graph analysis? Of course. * Quatrains of quotably quotable quotes: * mehals: Reading the AmazonStorage Wiki and Game of Thrones. Lannister took
nosql
You need answers, I know, but all I have here are some questions to consider when thinking about which database to use. These are taken from my webinar What Should I Do? Choosing SQL, NoSQL or Both for Scalable Web Applications. It's a companion article to What The
humor
Jumping around the social mediasphere, it's not uncommon to feel the heat generated in praise of a favorite this or that over all the clearly inferior alternatives. Whilst human nature may never cool, I think Old Will had some insight worth considering the next time a flame threatens
Example
Sometimes I get article proposals and then there's no follow up. Though these TripAdvisor data points are from 2010, I thought them worth sharing: Our site serves in excess of 100M dynamically generated page view a day (all media and static content goes through CDN), and we do