Afterweb

Why? Because programming is fun. Lots of fun. Working as CTO I mostly help organize this fun for others. It’s time to have some fun for myself. Where? Wekendapps in Santa Clara When? February 22 to February 24, 2007 Day 1 Started as typical Silicon Valley meet-up, with pizza and bunch of people crowded in small room, event fun was started. Some people came ready and prepared with friends and code snippets. I did not. Anyway crowd (with some help from organizers) gravitated into groups of people with similar skills. Ideas were presented. I liked what David ’s idea on searching FB users through their connections and common photo tagging. Started discussing/planning/coding the app. Day 2 Spent morning socializing. Realized that app we thought about on day one is not viral. David shared another idea – ‘painter’ who will draw a classic masterpiece on user’s profile page over time. Sort of growing gifts but more ‘sophisticated’. 4 p.m. really started to work on ...

Amazon Web Services user’s group meeting last night was slightly derailed from the presenter’s topic to the discussion about current approaches to highly scalable web architecture. Question is simple: in the new world of Web/Facebook applications when millions of users could be added virtually overnight, question of scalability should be addressed from the day one of application design. In order to make scalable Web application the most important consideration is the foundation it is build upon – choice of the database architecture. I know have seen four radically different approaches: Database clusters Database replication Federated data layer Non-relational databases Clusters require virtually no code change, scaled up to 32 nodes and in cases of Oracle (do not know anyone else who did it right) are prohibitively expensive for start-ups Database replication seems so appealing at the beginning… Basically forward all data update/write requests to the master and rea...