tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-206982122008-10-01T23:46:39.900-07:00Franknoreply@blogger.comBlogger216125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-39469467285434427542008-09-23T22:29:00.000-07:002008-10-01T23:46:39.912-07:00

12 Tips for Building a Scalable Startup Since scalability is considered a non-functional requirement, it is often overlooked in the hopes of decreasing time to market. Adding scalability down the road can decrease the time to market but only after assuming significant technical debt. Balancing performance and scalability vs. fast iteration and cost efficiency can be a significant challenge for

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-92121987525867942382008-09-18T13:47:00.000-07:002008-09-18T13:53:48.229-07:00

Sandy Jen, co-founder of Meebo, is on the stage talking about Scaling Synchronous Web Apps at Web 2.0 Expo. There are about 40 million unique people using it and they are around 50 people or so. The presentation is about tips and practices they have learned about how to scale now vs in 3 years. Scalability is very subjective. the "hole" - multi-platform (lots of browsers) - spotty network

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-11810017038318898682008-09-18T12:37:00.000-07:002008-09-23T06:19:28.557-07:00

Next session is Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users and You. Daniela Barbaosa and Chris Saad on the stage. They started data portability project together as co-founders 10 month ago. She works for Dow Jones and he works for Faraday Media. Version 1 of the Web was the Document Web. Version 2 is the Social Web. They think the next web is the personal web. Data Portability

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-29827336782719724592008-09-18T08:32:00.000-07:002008-09-18T09:17:21.668-07:00

Sitting now in Michael Lazerow's session, "Why Brand Advertisers Will Be the Biggest Beneficiaries of Social Media and How You Can Participate." Lazerow is a great speaker and this will be the third conference after Graphing Social Patterns and Social Ad Summit where he has been able to retain me as an audience member. I really need to make sure I get a Buddy Media (cool blue) t-shirt from him

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-28255757908070286202008-09-18T07:42:00.000-07:002008-09-18T08:17:11.353-07:00

Sitting in the session, Good to Great: Achieving Product Excellence in Web 2.0 by Dan Olsen at Web 2.0 Expo. How to Elicit User Needs and Problems: You need to understand your customers, talk to them and ask them what they like and don't like. Also important is observing their behavior. How can you do this with million of customers? Use quantitative research (.i.e. surveys) and site

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-52098405480272503752008-09-17T11:34:00.000-07:002008-09-17T11:36:39.398-07:00

I really wanted to go to "10 Things We've Learned at 37 Signals" session but ended up sitting in David's session "Go REST with Rails." However, I did find notes from Chad Capellman at Crowd Vine.

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-48450479544170610352008-09-17T08:20:00.000-07:002008-09-17T09:02:51.212-07:00

David Heinemeir Hansson is speaking on Go REST with Rails. David wasn't interested in programming but more interested in programs. They decided that at Basecamp they should have APIs. In 2004, not a whole lot of people knew about REST. Flickr API was very unsatisfying at that time. He didn't have an approach that they could hold on to encapsulate development. REST is based on HTTP. Problem with

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-64573043309909624962008-09-17T07:05:00.000-07:002008-09-17T07:53:07.690-07:00

I am sitting in the session Viral Marketing 2.0 at Web 2.0 Expo. The speaker is Jonah Peretti from BuzzFeed. Jonah is also the co-founder of Huffington Post. Why somethings go viral and why others don't? Virual diffusion is unpredictable and hard to control. Core concept that is important is "the bored at work network. (BWN)". The BWN is bigger than NBC, CBS, or any other traditional media

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-77298113185972658572008-09-14T19:36:00.000-07:002008-09-14T19:44:19.983-07:00

Tomorrow, I am attending Social Ad Summit which is being held at Tribeca Rooftop. Nick O'Neill has done a tremendous job with the session and speaker lineup which includes: 9:00am - 9:45am - Social Network Advertising • Spencer Ante, Computers Editor at BusinessWeek and author of “Creative Capital” (Moderator) • David Borstein, Director of Sales, MySpace • Bill Alena, VP of Advertising &

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-14993710728831711392008-08-20T07:22:00.000-07:002008-08-20T07:23:48.419-07:00

I needed to inspect the SSL certificate of my current employer using command line and found the following command to be handy: openssl s_client -connect www.domain.com:443 > domain.crt

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-24514342306901908222008-07-20T19:57:00.000-07:002008-07-20T20:22:54.818-07:00

Amazon's S3 service went down today and more than 7 hours later, it is still down. The service initially went down around 12:00PM EST and my latest check shows troubles continuing for sites that depend on S3. “Funny how Amazon doesn't use S3 to store any assets for amazon.com”tweet by @gruber Smugmug, a popular photo sharing site with more than 600 TB of data stored on S3 has been accessible

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-23292897838877456422008-07-20T19:47:00.000-07:002008-07-20T19:51:55.771-07:00

If you're a rock star web developer with expertise in Rails/Java/PHP and MySQL, I have several exciting opportunities available in New York. I've posted the job description for web developer and graphic designers at my MySQL blog. About the company: Give Real is a well-funded startup in the midst of an exciting period of growth and success. Our technology uses a patent pending platform that

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-78027019660533659072008-07-15T09:21:00.000-07:002008-07-15T09:29:48.717-07:00

Twitter has acquired Summize, a search engine for tweets and conversations. Summize.com is already resolving to search.twitter.com. I was recently introduced to Summize by Dan White of CafeMom and have since loved the service. “The deal started with a conversation with Fred Wilson about how conversational search can evolve into navigation, about how important navigation becomes for UGC as you

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-79723396680163182062008-07-10T09:34:00.000-07:002008-07-10T09:43:12.291-07:00

Marketing Sherpa's latest chart of the week is about the metrics that are underused by search marketers. The data was collected by asking Marketing Sherpa members about 'the most underused metrics in search' “Marketers with short, impulse-buy sales cycles were quite adamant that immediate sales should be tied to keywords when figuring out conversion...With prices rising steadily, marketers who

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-25916445009646076762008-07-09T08:03:00.000-07:002008-07-09T08:07:03.780-07:00

The slides from my second memcached webinar are embedded below. If you want you can also watch the memcached webinar on demand (includes sound). I would like to know what else you would like to know about in my next webinar on memcached. Please leave a comment or if you prefer, email me at fmashraqi [at] yahoo dot com.

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-41427763901499656962008-07-09T07:38:00.000-07:002008-07-09T08:18:04.988-07:00

My second webinar, Memcached for MySQL: Advanced Use Cases Webinar, that I presented for Sun/MySQL on July 3rd had more than 526 registrants (despite the fact that many people were on vacation at that time). A big thanks to everyone who attended. The recording of webinar (with sound) is now available on MySQL website. Also thanks to Jimmy Guerrero, Rich Taylor, Alex Roedling, Edwin DeSouza and

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-52506353598649859642008-07-05T14:04:00.000-07:002008-07-05T14:13:51.608-07:00

Yet more notes from Velocity. Next session is High-performance Ajax Applications by Julien Lecomte (Yahoo!). Plan for performance from day 1work closely with designers and product managersunderstand design rationaleexplain the tradeoffs between design and performanceoffer alternatives and shw what is possible (prototypes)as a last resort, simplify design Engineering high performance: a few

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-83312515288219930422008-07-05T13:36:00.000-07:002008-07-05T14:03:44.732-07:00

Next session is Stress, Load and Performance Testing in Quality Assurance by Goranka Bjedov of Google. I have been wanting to hear Goranka for some time now as her sessions usually end up becoming the highlight of the event. For record, she passionately hates Power Point (I don't blame her). I couldn't find a video of her Velocity talk but here is a video from her previous talk that's equally

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-12869440270655860262008-07-05T11:21:00.000-07:002008-07-05T11:29:49.264-07:00

Notes from Velocity. Next session is Actionable Logging for Smoother Operation and Faster Recovery by Mandi Walls (AOL). Actionable logging: no nonsense loggingconcise, easy to understandexpress symptoms of production issuesanything that makes the log needs to be fixed Why it's important? expending resources on production systemsthe point of logging in productiondiagnosis of issuesthe 4am test

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-67062467813236289092008-07-05T11:11:00.000-07:002008-07-05T11:17:33.349-07:00

More notes from Velocity. Next session is Clouds Are No Substitute for Competence by Javier Soltero of Hyperic. The promise of cloud computing: Cloud computing is the next big thing: Because it is green, easy, scalable, available and disposable. Cloud computing adds complexity: clouds allow you to run your applications, but mask the performance of the infrastructure powering them. NYT is

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-31968752532849591052008-07-05T10:42:00.000-07:002008-07-05T11:04:15.557-07:00

Yet more notes from Velocity. After the break, the next session is Energy Efficient Operations: Some Challenges and Opportunities. Luiz Barroso from Google is the presenter. I got a couple minutes late as I had to pick the charger. Server electricity usage in perspective: worldwide electricity usage of servers is around 1% of total electricity consumption.usage doubled between 2000 and

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-84679750643427114742008-07-05T10:19:00.000-07:002008-07-05T10:41:13.497-07:00

More notes from Velocity Last session before the break is "Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure" by John Fowler (Sun Microsystems). John is responsible for hardware at Sun. Applications are built in different ways. Three things Sun is working on: ComputingOpen Storagefocusing on $/performanceNetworkinghuge bandwidth He is talking about Web 2.0 architectures. The

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-27811475846565490602008-07-05T10:04:00.000-07:002008-07-05T10:18:29.003-07:00

Notes from Velocity Conference continue: Next up is a Keynote by Artur Bergman (Wikia). Wikia runs 7000 Wikis and has 400 million page views per month. Google, Yahoo and Amazon are what people rely onFriendster.com, Twitter and boo.com have serious reliability problem Value of performance/ reliability brand value (they rely on you)more page views (fixed amount of time + faster site) Match user

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-77313068015803445222008-07-05T10:01:00.001-07:002008-07-05T10:01:48.766-07:00

Continuation of my notes from Velocity Conference. Next up is Scott Ruthfield (WhitePages.com) talking about Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation. WhitePages.com is a people search power. They own 411.com. They have data on 180 million people doing 2 billion searches / year and 500 searches per second during peak. A top-50 comscore site. Very important performance

Franknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20698212.post-80857237931661842702008-07-05T08:34:00.000-07:002008-07-05T09:28:06.551-07:00

Better late than never. At Velocity Conference I took a lot of notes and didn't get to publish them earlier. Now that I find some time on my hand, I am going to go ahead and publish them. At Velocity, there will be two product launches. Vik Chaudhary (Keynote Systems, Inc.) and Abelardo Gonzalez (Keynote Systems) are on stage now. The first product is KITE (Keynote Internet Testing

Franknoreply@blogger.com