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Robert Scoble is a kind of Brothers Grimm for the digital age. Instead of inspired romantics walking around the country side collecting the folk tales of past ages, he is an inspired technologist documenting the current mythology of startups. One of the developments Robert is exploring is the rise of
Strategy
Hidden in every computer is a hardware backplane for moving signals around. Hidden in every application are ways of moving messages around and giving code CPU time to process them. Unhiding those capabilities and making them first class facilities for the programmer to control is the idea behind AppBackplane. This
hot links
Hey, it's HighScalability time: * 1 Billion/Month : Active Mostly Mobile YouTube Users * Quotable Quotes: * @NeckbeardHacker: "Wait...he reimplemented swatch and rsync in chef, node and mongo?""Yup." "......Why?""Go easy on him...he's a Ninjipsterstar." * @b6n: Scale myth
John McCutchan, after a long career spent working on the Linux kernel and being hired out as a code optimization guru, joined Google's Dart team. A curious hire until you watch Bringing SIMD to the Web via Dart, where John makes a programmer accessible explanation of why he
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Who's Hiring? * Fitbit is hiring a Site Operations Lead to help us on our mission to make the world a healthier place! Fitbit's wearable fitness devices are worn by people across the world, each syncing with the web site, wirelessly and automatically, every 15 minutes. Join
Strategy
There's not a lot of talk about application architectures at the process level. You have your threads, pools of threads, and you have your callback models. That's about it. Languages/frameworks making a virtue out of simple models, like Go and Erlang, do so at the
hot links
Hey, it's HighScalability time: * 0: # of Google Readers; 2.5 billion/day: new pieces of content added to Facebook; 2.7 billion/day: likes added to Facebook; 7PB/month: photos added to Facebook * Quotable Quotes: * @cwgem: It seems like cutting down API access is the stock scalability answer
Example
For the last few months I've been programming a system in Go, so I'm always on the lookout for information to feed my confirmation bias. An opportunity popped up when Iron.io wrote about their experience using Go to rewrite IronWorker, their ever busy job execution
humor
I am in no way a music expert, but when I listen to Symphony No. 4 by Charles Ives, I imagine it's what a complex software/hardware system might sound like if we could hear its inner workings. Ives uses a lot of riotously competing rhythms in this
Strategy
We talked about 42 Monster Problems That Attack As Loads Increase. And in The Aggregation Collection we talked about the value of prioritizing work and making smart queues as a way of absorbing and not reflecting traffic spikes. Now we move on to our next batch of strategies where the
hot links
Hey, it's HighScalability time: * Quotable Quotes: * @ibogost: Disabling features of SimCity due to ineffective central infrastructure is probably the most realistic simulation of the modern city. * antirez: The point is simply to show how SSDs can't be considered, currently, as a bit slower version of memory.
Paper
In Algorithm Design for Performance Aware VM Consolidation we learn some shocking facts (gambling in Casablanca?): * Average server utilization in many data centers is low, estimated between 5% and 15%. This is wasteful because an idle server often consumes more than 50% of peak power. * Surely that's just