Jilles’ weblog

A long while ago, Joel Spolsky added a Reddit.com site just to expiriment. Didn’t pay too much attention to it back then. Last evening I did visit the site, and there is some good links there. So, not feeling that creative myself, I’ll repost some of the more interesting links.

Headrush is a blog supposedly about “Creating Passionate Users”. Cannot attest to that myself since I didn’t read mover than 15% of the content on the site. One of the best articles is “Death by risk aversion“. The article talks about allways targetting the outer extremes of scale instead of being mediocre. DO yourself a pleasure, follow that link and just look at the 3 graphs used in the article and you will understand what the article says.

Most of my collegues know that I have a dog, and we (me and my girlfriend) are pretty serious in training her. During some of the training sessions we use a technique called the “clicker technique”. It works like this: first you give your dog a lot of little cookies, one by one. With each cookie you don’t say a thing but make a little “click” with the clicker. After a while the dog will associate the click sound with something positive (and will actually start drooling just by hearing the sound). Kathy connects this with e-mail addiction (blackberry anyone?).

Thirdly, she has a nice article (still fresh!) about information anxiety and trying to keep up with everyone else. One of the things I do personally is go really fast through all my bloglines subscriptions and force myself to only read two full articles, done. Too bad if the blogosphere decided to write more than two interesting articles — if they were so good someone else will repost them tomorrow and I can go for a rebound.

A second blog, called Rands In Respose, has a really nice article up about why web startups are most of the time failing and what to do about it. Really, the article is too long and too good to just summarize here. So, go read it! No really, the article is good, go read it!

A second article on that blog is about the “Free Electron” in your development team:

A Free Electron can do anything when it comes to code. They can write a complete application from scratch, learn a language in a weekend, and, most importantly, they can dive into a tremendous pile of spaghetti code, make sense of it, and actually getting it working. You can build an entire businesses around a Free Electron. They’re that good.

There is some gold in that article as well. Example: don’t send your Free Electron off fixing those three memory leaks:

When he returned, the bugs were fixed and the entire database layer had been rewritten. A piece of code that’d taken two engineers roughly six months to design had been totally redone in seven days. Sound like a great idea until you realize we were working on a small update and did not have the resources or time to test a brand spankin’ new database layer. Oops.

Thats it for now…Thanks for all the fish.

There are a lot of interesting discussions and posts going on lately on how certain high profile websites. Particulary, a series of posts on O’Reilly Radar. The first post is about Second Life, where they talk about MySQL (seperate master-slave pairs handling the data partitions with one master-slave pair indicating where what data lives).

The second installment features Bloglines which uses MySQL (Users and passwords in one master-slave, feed information in another) but also large parts in some file storage.

A third posting talks about Flickr, who basically started out with the “one database fits all”-methodology on MySQL. And this is where I think experience really comes into play. If you were designing the Flickr database with, for example, Bloglines’ experience under your belt you would not have started out that way. But Flicker too, couldn’t escape the segmentation and divided their data up in what they call “shards” (seperate master-slave pairs as I read it).

So, it is pretty apperent that MySQL is being used for some fairly large sites while most of these employ the strategy of segmenting the data across several master-slave combinations. Some are actually useing LiveJournals’ memcached too!

While working on a draft article for this site I needed to collect some weird images of myself which could then be used in a collage because one of my collegues is going to leave. I myself don’t want to pick that image, and was going to offer the creators of the collage the options. While not wanting to send them megabytes of images, I thought I might do it the Web 2.0 way and put them up on Flickr. Since someone is going to find them anyway, I might as well point you guys to it.