programming - One - Jud Valeski's blog (Page 2)

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A collection of 44 posts

Streams

I just got a question via email that threw me back to my days at Netscape/Mozilla implementing nsIStreamConverter [http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/netwerk/streamconv/public/nsIStreamConverter.idl] . The question is "how do I process streamed data?" There are many answers, but I thought I'

Customer Support and Clouds

You know your business is becoming a commodity when your competitor differentiation becomes "better customer support." If you get to this point, you better be a significant marketshare player in your space otherwise the end is near. Decent customer support is very expensive, and therefore very few firms,

Testing 1, 2, 3

Gnip received a request to go over how we "test." I hope the following is useful. While we don't practice TDD (Test Driven Development) outright, I'd consider us in that vein. We are test heavy, and many of our tests are written before the

Gnip: What's worked well, and what hasn't.

Gnip's almost a year old. That combined with a great week which included a stellar board meeting, technical clarity around specific areas, business/requirements clarity around specific areas, and an impending big release motivated this blog post. We have built an amazing back plane that's driving

Estimating Code (Stories)

Estimating Code (Stories)

I've worked in several "Agile" development teams over the years; from developer, to manager. Estimates are always one of the challenging things around software; both development's actual estimates (making them is very hard), as well as management's interpretation/understanding of them. Some

Anatomy of a shared memory node failure.

After my previous post about teams [/teams-rookies-vets], I quickly received several requests to provide more details. Voici! Gnip's redundant; you can walk up to any of our cloud instances, vaporize it, and Gnip chugs along its merry way. We use shared memory (via TerraCotta) to replicate memory across

Teams, Rookies & Vets

Teams, Rookies & Vets

A week ago, almost to the minute, the following message was generated by an internal Gnip monitoring server, and sent to the person on-call. ** PROBLEM alert - production-head2/production-head2-gnip is CRITICAL ** It was the start to a very long, non-stop, few days at Gnip. Much of the rapport on your

From Defrag to Glue; simplicity

I was on the last Defrag '08 [http://defragcon.com/2008/] panel yesterday and I had a blast! We were talking about "glue [http://www.foundrygroup.com/blog/archives/2008/03/theme-glue.php]" as a promotion of next year's Glue conference [http://gluecon.com/]. Geir

By default...

Software is all about default behavior. From pure infrastructure plays (e.g. Gnip [http://gnipcentral.com]) to general population consumer facing applications (e.g. Apple products). Whether you want to call your software's configuration, "preferences," "settings," "configuration," or "config," they&

What kind of Cloud is your solution?

Cirus - What IBM is building. Cumulonimbus - Amazon Stratus - Mosso Cumulus - Google App Engine Fog - we've seen a few of these crop up. they're generally random, small, traditional managed hosting providers jumping into the game with 25% baked APIs to run on

iPhone 3G/2.x firmware disappointment

I had two concerns just over a year ago with leaving my Palm Treo 680 for the iPhone. One, how was I going to do going from a physical keyboard with plenty of tactile feedback, to a touch screen with none? Two, how was UI responsiveness going to be? Physical,

me.dium social search is here

after a lot of work, me.dium social search is finally here! blending real-time human behavior with search results provides a powerful view into information on the network. it's in its infancy, but I encourage you to check it out here. http://me.dium.com/search if you

Sockets, HTTP, XMPP, and Leap Frog

My efforts at Gnip [http://gnipcentral.com] have caused me to re-consider a few things on the protocol front. Growing up at Netscape in the "netlib" group (really just 3 of us) gave me an interesting perspective on "internet protocols." Over the years it became apparent

Gnip's Head is in the Clouds

Our transition to AWS / Ec 2 is complete. It's been a fascinating three weeks of porting. Last night, we internally deployed Gnip to several Ec 2 instances. Our current partners are still on the "old Gnip " which is hosted at a traditional managed hosting environment, but

Forecast: Sunny Skies & Windy

It took us a few days, but we've ported our system over to AWS. We're not clustered in the cloud yet, but that's next. We'll be conducting load tests next week. My first impression of AWS is posted here [/tomorrows-forecast-cloudy-skies]. What'

Tomorrow's Forecast: Cloudy Skies & Sunshine

Tomorrow's Forecast: Cloudy Skies & Sunshine

Our managed hosting solution reach a tipping point yesterday. We hit a environment configuration bump that was going to eat 24-36 of our precious startup development hours. This was second bump we'd hit with our hosted hardware provider, and it caused me to pick up the phone to

SPOFs and Clouds

I'm really excited about the Cloud computing frenzy in the marketplace right now. So many under utilized CPU cycles within large corporate data centers (eBay, Amazon, Google, AOL, Microsoft, others) are begging for communal use. Amazon leads the pack by far right now, but I'm anxious

Push me, Pull me, please me, tease me!

Several of us (Josh Kopelman [http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/03/feed-frenzy.html], Brad Feld [http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2008/03/i_need_a_news_f.html]) are having deja vu around various notification schemes floating around the network today. We're seeing the exact same pattern

lazy loading and UX

The concept of lazy loading is an old one in the context of software programming. The idea is that you only do an expensive operation at the last possible moment, as to not do a bunch of expensive, slow, stuff unless it's absolutely necessary. As an example, you