The Facebook Curve

6 years ago, Facebook was one server in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room running PHP, MySQL and Apache 1.3.

6 years later they have 500 million active users, tens of thousands of servers, and they still use PHP. Sort of.

This growth and infrastructure complexity, along with their engineering-led culture, utterly fascinates me. Where do they go from here? And what effect will the solutions they have to find to cope with this mind-boggling growth have on the web application development world? This tech talk offers fascinating insight into how they’re approaching problems no-one has had to face before on this scale.

Posted by Olly on January 29, 2011 Comments (0) | Permalink | Comments feed

Terminal boredom

I never did get on with Terminal.app. I can’t remember why exactly, but we were not best mates. Something not quite right about it. Anyway this friction led me to find iTerm early in my Mac career and we’ve been buddies for years, but the irrational geek in me gets bothered when apps get no loving. And iTerm has had no loving in years (0.10 forever). No self-respecting geek wants to be associated with abandonware, even if it’s a great product which never causes a problem. Geeks like problems, dammit!

So it gave me great pleasure to read about iTerm2 this week. It’s a fork of iTerm and it’s in alpha. Buggy as hell but that’s the point.

Download it and give it a bash (boom boom!).

Posted by Olly on January 14, 2011 Comments (0) | Permalink | Comments feed

Gasping, but somehow still alive

My ‘portfolio’ site, which was a nice idea six years ago, has bitten the dust. It’s digital remains live on in an SVN repo somewhere on the dusty old VM which hosts this site, but I’ve actually forgotten how to use SVN and I have no intention of relearning it so for all intents and purposes it’s history.

So the blog which promised so little and delivered precisely that has been promoted to the top level domain. No more is it squirrelled away on a silly subdomain, it’s now just raw, unadulterated, uninteresting, pointless content. Where will it go from here? Is this the last gasp or will I have nothing better to do with any free time I find myself with (which has strangely eluded me for the past few years) than write something vaguely geek-related here?

Perhaps I’ll set myself a deadline, with punishment by cron if I fail to deliver.

0 0 11 7 * rm -rf /var/www/lylo.co.uk/

Tick, tock, tick…

Posted by Olly on January 11, 2011 Comments (2) | Permalink | Comments feed