Laughing Meme » Aside

SnapGroups: Mark Fletcher’s Lightweight Discussion

Kellan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:33:25 +0000

I’m a big fan of lightweight, ridiculously easy group forming, and of Mark Fletcher’s work, so I’m excited about SnapGroups. More interesting to me though is to see he chose to use Mongo, as Mark handrolled a custom datastore to Bloglines. Validates some of my cautious optimism for Mongo delivering on some of its promise.

Wikimedia has a users RPE of 30mil

Kellan — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:43:49 +0000

“Wikimedia Foundation currently employs 14 technical people (not all of whom are developers). At 400 million readers/month (as of February 2010), that’s about 1 developer per 30 million users. Accounting for open source developers probably doesn’t change that ratio by an order of magnitude.” (not exactly apples to apples, but still interesting)

OAuth Echo – delegation in identity verification – mehack

Kellan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:35:11 +0000

Glad to see Raffi getting this stuff out. These “vouched for” experiences are going to be the next key pieces towards enabling decentralization and service re-composition.

Dens: First thoughts on Google Buzz for mobile (Alex is telling me the web version is a whole new can of worms)

Kellan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:28:15 +0000

“#3. Is Google Buzz the Facebook / Twitter / foursquare killer? No. Using Buzz requires more thought / more work than Facebook or Twitter and comes with less reward … For social apps the feature overlap is irrelevant – it’s about the motivation to use the product and the culture that drives participation.”

Flickr Developer Blog: 5 Questions for Simon Willison

Kellan — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:38:35 +0000

My interview with Simon is up, and full of wildlife, machine tag goodness, and a couple of easter eggs as well.

Why I love everything you hate about Java « Magic Scaling Sprinkles

Kellan — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:39:28 +0000

NK: “All that boilerplate is really important when you work at massive scale and where efficiency really matters.” More meditations on the coding for scale question and the role of cleverness and abstractions. That said I think the factories actually hide the hard learning that’s gone into those pool size choices.

Abusing MySQL: The Federated Engine « mikhail panchenko

Kellan — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:52:18 +0000

Mike, I think my head hurts.

Richard Crowley: OpenDNS MySQL abuses

Kellan — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:52:30 +0000

“INSERTs contains values that are pre-sorted in PRIMARY KEY order to avoid deadlock … To delete old data, a new table is swapped into place using RENAME TABLE … MySQL is still a pretty heavy hammer.” Beautiful.

Joe Stump: Fail fast and often

Kellan — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:57:16 +0000

And this isn’t just for startups, the times when we’ve lost track of our ability to fail have been the most difficult times at Flickr.

Facebook: “our engineering team is relatively small — there are over one million users to every engineer”

Kellan — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:38:58 +0000

Throw away line in the Facebook HipHop post gives us the Facebook RPE, 1mil vs Flickr’s 2.5mil.

the hose drawer (tecznotes)

Kellan — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:19:11 +0000

“The firehose offers a continuous flow of data, yet requires us to break that flow down into discrete chunk … t-shirts cut from unending tubular knit fabrics, continuously-cast steel, simulated egg yolks sliced from unbroken cylinders.” Glass beads on a wire.

“Normalization is for sissies” will never work!

Kellan — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 04:54:34 +0000

Found this Kottke post from 2004, quoting Cal’s original (I think) “normalization is for sisses” talk. Love reading through the comments on that post patiently explaining how it will never work!

Flickr Blog: Fence Friday

Kellan — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:03:41 +0000

Twitter has #followfriday. If I were ever to rebuild Flickr from the ground up, I’d collapse the distinction between tags and groups for thematic collaboration. Explicit grouping is useful only when you need to create a sense of place, a trick most easily accomplished in virtual environment by articulating a membership, and a history. Collaboration does not need place, it needs energy.

Fewest days in the month = least commitment to sparkle motion

Kellan — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:04:04 +0000

Haughey’s post in what I see as a new genre of “I-miss-blogging” style posts, distinct from the old “I’m-sorry-I-haven’t-posted-recently” apologies we used to see.

Noticings in Midtown West, New York, United States

Kellan — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:41:35 +0000

Currently I’m the only one, with Web 2.0 Expo is going on I thought there would be more. Play in New York is currently very sparse. The bespoke uploadr may help.

A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database

Kellan — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:28:08 +0000

I’m a card carrying member of the Olson fan club, but it’s still great reading see Jon’s love note. ADO has a posse. (actually I only have 5 posts tagged olson, while I have 7 posts tagged udell )

“Alive in Joburg” is a glimpse into how brilliant “District 9″ could have been

Kellan — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:32:48 +0000

Textured, balanced, thought provoking, visually distinctive. D9 in contrast was shallow, focused on easy laughs, and gross out gags, and deeply problematic portrayals of apartheid and race. (via cal)

#2 Every Building with a Shoebox in it’s Basement

Kellan — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:00:00 +0000

“Buildings could offer WiFi photo uploading service, in return for keeping the photos taken of them….… what if Cloudgate were built with servers and wireless inside, right from the start, offering to consume the photos taken of it. You take a shot with a wireless enabled camera and it could store a copy for you. It’s building up a library of itself, in all seasons, in all weather. Meanwhile you, have a backup, findable by time and browsing, stored safely in the Cloud!”

rev=canonical: url shortening that doesn’t hurt the internet

Kellan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:54:39 +0000

A URL shortener that implements rev=”canonical”.

World Builder by Bruce Branit

Kellan — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:40:25 +0000

Wow.