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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
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
Scalability
This is a guest post by Ashwanth Fernando, Software Engineer from the trenches at large scale internet companies. Inspired by the book "Effective Java" by Joshua Bloch, I wanted to share my holistic recommendations on building high traffic web software (i.e. web applications/services that serve high
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
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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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
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
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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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
Strategy
Jeremy Edberg gave a talk on Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion–Pitfalls and Lessons and one of the issues they had was that they: Did not account for increased latency after moving to EC2. In the datacenter they had submillisecond access between machines so it was possible
Example
This is a guest post written by Victor Trac, Cloud Architect at Bazaarvoice. Bazaarvoice is a company that people interact with on a regular basis but have probably never heard of. If you read customer reviews on sites like bestbuy.com, nike.com, or walmart.com, you are using Bazaarvoice
humor
Love this little example of the human condition from John Kellden via Ilya Grigorik. This happens so often to me shopping at Costco or making lane changes on the highway or picking stocks. Sometimes it's just never the right line and trying to make it better only makes