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Mobile developers have a huge scaling problem ahead: doing something useful with massive continuous streams of telemetry data from millions and millions of devices. This is a really good problem to have. It means smartphone sales are finally fulfilling their destiny: slaughtering PCs in the sales arena. And it also
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A lot has happened since my first article on the Stack Overflow Architecture. Contrary to the theme of that last article, which lavished attention on Stack Overflow's dedication to a scale-up strategy, Stack Overflow has both grown up and out in the last few years. Stack Overflow has
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This is an interview with Wade Simmons, an Infrastructure Engineer at SimpleGeo, a service making it easy for developers to create location-aware applications, on their increasing use of Node.js as a backend service component, replacing code that would have at one time been written in Java, Python or Ruby.
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Wordnik is an online dictionary and language resource that has both a website and an API component. Their goal is to show you as much information as possible, as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make
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Mollom is one of those cool SaaS companies every developer dreams of creating when they wrack their brains looking for a viable software-as-a-service startup. Mollom profitably runs a useful service—spam filtering—with a small group of geographically distributed developers. Mollom helps protect nearly 40,000 websites from spam, including
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How would you implement a key-value storage system if you were starting from scratch? The approach Basho settled on with Bitcask, their new backend for Riak, is an interesting combination of using RAM to store a hash map of file pointers to values and a log-structured file system for efficient
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I know people are always interested in what others are using to build their systems. Alex Payne, CTO of the new startup BankSimple, gives us a quick hit on their toolchain choices in this Quora thread. BankSimple positions itself as a customer-focused alternative to online banking. You may remember Alex
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How do you keep a system small enough, while still being successful, that a simple scale-up strategy becomes the preferred architecture? StackOverflow, for example, could stick with a tool chain they were comfortable with because they had a natural brake on how fast they could grow: there are only so
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You may have read somewhere that Facebook has introduced a new Social Inbox integrating email, IM, SMS, text messages, on-site Facebook messages. All-in-all they need to store over 135 billion messages a month. Where do they store all that stuff? Facebook's Kannan Muthukkaruppan gives the surprise answer in
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This presentation and video by Jason Yan and David Cramer discusses how they scaled DISQUS, a comments as a service service for easily adding comments to your site and connecting communities. The presentation is very good, so here are just a few highlights: * Traffic: 17,000 requests/second peak; 450,
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The BBC's iPlayer site averages 8 million page views a day for 1.3 million users. Technical Architect Simon Frost describes how they scaled their site in Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand: 1. Use frameworks. Frameworks support component based development which makes it convenient for team
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Ten million players a day and over fifty million players a month interact socially with friends using Playfish games on social platforms like The Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone. Playfish was an early innovator in the fastest growing segment of the game industry: social gaming, which is the love child