John Adams’ views on emerging technologies, software engineering, and various hacks
This post is bit of a diversion for this blog, which is usually me babbling on about tech.
SXSW starts this Thursday, and I’ll be attending. You can catch me speaking on a funny panel called “How not to be a Douchebag at SXSW”, which Ed Huntsinger is hosting. But hey, it won’t be about [...]
Hello! It’s 2010, a new year and I’ve got some speaking engagements coming up, where I’ll discuss Twitter operations and scaling.
Web 2.0 Expo 2010, San Francisco, CA
May 3rd-6th
In the Belly of the Whale: Operations at Twitter
Chirp (Twitter’s Official Developer Conference)
San Francisco, CA
April 15th, 2010, 4:30PM (Hack Day)
Scaling Twitter: I’ll be speaking on some of the [...]
Engadget recently featured an article describing YouTube’s blocking of 1080p content from select sites which allowed users to display the content on televisions instead of their computer monitors, or sites which utilized the YouTube API. Like the Hulu block last year, blocking the PS3 from watching shows, it marked another moment when television content producers [...]
Here’s two scripts you can run if you have a 3G card, and a few friends stuck in the hotel room with you who want WiFi.
First, turn your laptop into an access point. These scripts work on MacOS X running 10.5.4 or better — good luck!
I call this script ‘make-me-an-access-point.sh’:
#!/bin/sh
#Edit your /etc/rc.conf to set [...]
Two great presentations I’ve recently read and want to share with you:
Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle’s “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On“.
Read that, perhaps while watching/listening toKevin Kelly’s riveting talk (from the TED EG conference) on the next 5000 days of the web (that’s right, we’re only 5000 days old) and the future of [...]
Last Tuesday, I was part of the Velocity 2009 Keynote, where I gave a talk entitled, “Fixing Twitter”. I covered the last year or so of work in improving Twitter to deal with the massive traffic and user loads we’ve been under and how we use metrics to destroy the fail-whale.
Details of the talk are [...]
Frequently you want to predict when things are going to happen, and if it’s not the end of the world, it might be something occurring a bit sooner, such as your disk filling up.
First capture some data, with cron. We’re going to capture the free space in our database, once a day, so we’ll put [...]
I posted this in response to a post on GigaOM, but it was such a long comment, I felt that it was worthy as a post on it’s own.
The workloads of social networking sites fall mostly into the ‘read lots, write once’ class (most of the web exists within this paradigm.) Regardless of the database [...]
I’m announcing the release of mod_memcache_block, a distributed IP blocking system for Apache, with rate limiting based on HTTP request code.
For many years I’ve had a need for a module like this — A distributed blocking system which could operate across large web serving clusters and register hits in a central store. With rate limiting, [...]
There’s a small interview with me in today’s O’Reilly radar, where I talk about some of the things that I’ll be presenting as part of my Velocity 2009 talk. You can listen to, and read the transcript here:
