John Allspaw is a great ops engineer. Our very own Matt Cupples is a big fan, and I am too. I'd heard great things from my Y! and Flickr friends (Allspaw used to work his magic at the more-complicated-than-you-might-imagine Flickr), and when I read his book The Art Of Capacity Planning around '08, I completely understood why people said good things.
Since VentureBeat doesn't seem to want to display my comment on Nebo Djurdjevic's (good) post about the Square-Starbucks deal
Are there regulatory or contractual issues with combining small payments across multiple merchants?
[Nebo says] they're going to combine payments because people make purchases at Starbucks frequently. That means the next step is combining a week's worth of Starbucks purchases with purchases from another... Continue reading »
Hongli Lai posted on the Phusion blog the other day about Live Streaming in Rails 4. This looks like a nice feature, especially since Node has gotten so big. But it's unlikely to kill Node, or even significantly limit Node.
If there's a very small component of an app that will benefit from being able to stream data to the client, this is a... Continue reading »
LinkedIn has a clever trick for their 500 error page. A 500 error means that something went wrong on the server, for example, a bug in the code. It's the kind of thing where it's helpful for an engineer to get some information about the server, because hearing a user say "it's not working" isn't useful for solving the problem.
Here's a screenshot of LinkedIn's... Continue reading »
Building a good company means connecting with your customers. Good product people are generally the ones who understand this, but it isn't just limited to the products themselves.
I'm looking for new running shoes, and the REI in San Francisco is close to me and has what I want in stock. I pulled up their address page, and noticed this.
...websites are now much more complex than before, and generally require a lot more engineering efforts to be robust and scalable.
One of the biggest challenges for a website architect has always been concurrency. Since the beginning of web services, the level of concurrency has been continuously growing. It's not uncommon for a popular website to serve hundreds of thousands and even millions of... Continue reading »
If you write software for a living and you're located in Silicon Valley, you have your pick of employment options at an array of tech start-ups -- yes, even in this economy. When a recruiter's pitch is: "Wanna bro down and crush some code?" -- like San Francisco-based Klout's was -- you get a sense of what that company is looking for. If you're... Continue reading »