Shindig, Ning, OpenSocial, and, er.. ME!
Dion posted an interview he did with me on OpenSocial, Shindig, and Ning.
He says way too many nice things about me, but Shindig is pretty cool :-) We need a website for it pretty badly...
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Tue, 19 Jun 2007Scaling is the new theme of my programmering life it seems. The good part: it really means scaling, not performance. The bad part: things actually need to scale, performing really well doesn't let you squeak by with session affinity and half-assed replication. The biggest thing I have noticed, in myself, is a move from thinking about how to implement services to how to ensure that interactions between them don't become the bottleneck.
Sometimes this is a question of protocols in the IETF sense: HTTP, SMTP, DNS, XMPP, etc. Most of the IETF protocols are pretty damned good, as it turns out. Shocking huh? Many other times it is a matter of protocols in the traditional sense: what does the interaction need to look like. How many messages need to be sent, how quickly, how reliably? Who cares what is inside the box -- if between Martin, Diego, Tom, Tim, Lili, David and myself we cannot drag it to somewhere near enough an optimal solution, something is really wrong. What is inside a server is not the problem.
The problem is fun things like tolerating (or failing quickly in the face of) network partitions, managing work scheduling fairly across an arbitrary number of machines (or not, unfair scheduling frequently works better), avoiding cascading failures when one element goes down (and better yet, still working for the most part), knowing what is going on in the live system beyond a conceptual level, working out what is cacheable where, how, how long, how many, and so on. We've all dealt with these to some degree, but when they really become the key point it rocks!
The protocols between services are where the fun is, I had no idea! The turning point was probably the day "Enterprise" in a product description went from meaning "consultants required" to "probably cannot handle the load." Totally unfair to a lot of good products which have had Enterprise slapped on them by marketing, but those are sadly in the minority. When you say "we need to double the number of servers" then, minutes later, you have doubled the number of servers and things are copacetic, life is good.
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When I started this blog four years ago I figured I would generally avoid talking about work. The most interesting stuff I was playing with was outside of work, and it seemed the safe and sane course.
Then I started at a place doing awesome stuff and suddenly the most interesting stuff I am doing is at work. D'oh! This has lead to me really wanting to talk about a lot of things and running into the "wait, this is work."
Net: I am going to start talking about work, it is the most interesting programmery stuff I am doing :-)
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Sat, 24 Jun 2006Last night (well, in the wee hours of this morning, really) we released the JavaScript/Ajax wonder I've been working on for a while, and I'm too excited to not blab about it just a bit.
The relevant bit is (what starts) as the bar across the top (of CCHits in this case), and all the stuff inside it. Basically, we got rid of the sidebar, and removed the need to hit the system pages for most things. Oh yeah, it is wholly rebrandable, and you can get rid of it if you don't like it (I bet you will like it, though)! Nice and all, but more fun is how programmable it is -- the whole thing is designed to be fully customized by app developers who want to change what we think is useful into what is really useful for them. Aside from the JS, we added web services to do access the majority of system functionality without having to hit our system pages at all!
As with the content store, most of the core functionality is exposed via APIs, in this case most of the new ones use JSON instead of Atom as the most common client is JavaScript in the browser, and it is darned tooting nice to work with. I'm going to shut up now and go pack for a my trip to Italy. Poke at the docs if you like, please (I didn't write them, but I am extremely excited about it all).
Update
Gina is awake enough to done a much better excited post. Check it for more details.