humor
xkcd: How Standards Proliferate:
The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from. What is it about human nature that makes this so recognizably true?
High Scalability
Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.
Paper
Paper: Nanocubes: Nanocubes for Real-Time Exploration of Spatiotemporal Datasets
How do you turn Big Data into fast, useful, and interesting visualizations? Using R and technology called Nanocubes. The visualizations are stunning and amazingly reactive. Almost as interesting as the technologies behind them. David Smith wrote a great article explaining the technology and showing a demo by Simon Urbanek of
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Sponsored Post: Netflix, Logentries, Host Color, Booking, Spokeo, Apple, ScaleOut, MongoDB, BlueStripe, AiScaler, Aerospike, New Relic, LogicMonitor, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7
Who's Hiring? * Apple is hiring for multiple positions. Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, great ideas have a way of becoming great products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. * Quality Assurance Engineer. The iOS Systems team is looking for a Quality Assurance engineer. In this role
Strategy
What Happens While Your Brain Sleeps is Surprisingly Like How Computers Stay Sane
There's a deep similarity between how long running systems like our brains and computers accumulate errors and repair themselves. Reboot it. Isn’t that the common treatment for most computer ailments? And you may have noticed now that your iPhone supports background processing it reboots a lot more
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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 20th, 2013
Hey, it's HighScalability time (with so much cool info this week it will blow your mind): Amazing microscope image of a carnivorous bladderwort * How many drones would it take to replace Santa? With a fleet of some 80 million or so F-16 drones the entire worldwide delivery could
Strategy
How to get started with sizing and capacity planning, assuming you don't know the software behavior?
Here's a common situation and question from the mechanical-sympathy Google group by Avinash Agrawal on the black art of capacity planning: How to get started with sizing and capacity planning, assuming we don't know the software behavior and its completely new product to deal with? Gil
Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 13th, 2013
Hey, it's HighScalability time: Test your sense of scale. Is this image of something microscopic or macroscopic? Find out. * 80 billion: Netflix logging events per day; 10 petabytes: Ancestry.com data; six million: Foursquare checkins per day; * Quotable Quotes: * George Lakoff: What can't all your thoughts
Strategy
Using Node.js PayPal Doubles RPS, Lowers Latency, with Fewer Developers, but Where Do the Improvements Really Come From?
PayPal gives yet another glowing report of an app rewritten in node.js experiencing substantial performance improvements. PayPal rewrote their account overview page, one of the most trafficked apps on the website, which was previously written in King Java. The benefits: 1. Full-stack engineers. Using JavaScript on both the front-end
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Sponsored Post: Booking, Spokeo, Apple, NuoDB, ScaleOut, MongoDB, BlueStripe, AiScaler, Aerospike, New Relic, LogicMonitor, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7
Who's Hiring? * Apple is hiring for multiple positions. Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, great ideas have a way of becoming great products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. * Quality Assurance Engineer. The iOS Systems team is looking for a Quality Assurance engineer. In this role
In Memory: Grace Hopper to Programmers: Mind Your Nanoseconds!
This is an article published last year, but as today is Grace Hopper's birthday I thought it would be a good time to share again an amazing talk from this amazing woman. Computing pioneer Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler, searched for a concrete way to create an
Strategy
Site Moves from PHP to Facebook's HipHop, Now Pages Load in .6 Seconds Instead of Five
If you code in PHP have you ever wondered about moving to Facebook's HipHop JIT Virtual Machine for PHP? With HipHop Facebook achieved over a 9x increase in web request throughput and over a 5x reduction in memory consumption compared to Zend PHP 5.2 engine + APC. But
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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 6th, 2013
Hey, it's HighScalability time: Test your sense of scale. Is this image of something microscopic or macroscopic? Find out. * 72: Intel's 72 core x86 Processor; One Trillion: number of fonts served by Google. * Quotable Quotes: * West-Eberhard: The gene does not lead, it follows. * @waldojaquith: To an