As previously noted, a few members of the Lokku engineering team attended the UKs first ScaleCamp last Friday and we have photographic evidence to prove it:
We were also proud sponsors of the booze served immediately before and during the round of lightening talks at the end of the day. Some of the effects may be apparent in the photo.
There was a lot of good content shared at the meeting. Sessions of particular note included a spirited discussion about available data graphing systems for application monitoring, a very convincing discussion of the benefits of a coat of Varnish, and last.fm discussing how to scale up by 5x in the very short term.
Big thanks to The Guardian for hosting in their very nice offices near King’s Cross. We look forward to attending (and sponsoring) bigger and better such events in the future.
The good people at The Guardian are hosting UK Scale Camp on the 4th of December. As far as I know, this is London’s first event focused exclusively on scaling applications for the web. This is an unconference, so the schedule is not set in stone, but the content will likely be similar to Velocity, with a European focus of course. Scaling high-performance web applications is something that is near and dear to our hearts at Nestoria. And so is drinking. For those reasons, we are doubly proud to be the event’s first sponsor and to have our money going towards crucial Friday beverages for attendees.
Not yet clear if anyone from Nestoria will be speaking at the event, but given our 3+ years of scaling up Nestoria from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users, I think we should have at least some relevant source material to draw from. Always nice to share a few war stories, but also very much looking forward to hear how other European web companies are integrating the long list of new scaling-related technologies out there – especially those from the FOSS community.
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Those that follow these things will know by now that OSCON 2009 took place in San Jose, California rather than its traditional home of Portland, Oregon. Since this was my first year in attendance, I can not compare the two locations, but I can say that SJ was a welcome and consistently sunny break from the unreliable British Summer. Lokku was good enough to let me go for the entire conference (2 days of half day tutorials followed by 2.5 days of one hour sessions and exhibitions), and I’ve come back quite a bit wiser on the happenings in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.
I took the opportunity of the tutorials to get my head around some new (to me) programming languages. SmallTalk is the original OO lingo with a legacy going back to the 1980s. It has never been in favor for commercial development despite having had features back then that many “modern” OO languages (e.g. Java) lack today. I was impressed by the Squeak development environment and its close interaction with the SmallTalk VM. Working with SmallTalk requires a big change in mindset, but I see how it is worth it for a certain family of applications. I get the impression that lots of current SmallTalk work is based on Seaside – a web frameframework that is the basis of the very cool DabbleDB online data navigator.
Erlang is another language with a long history that is back in the news of late. Originally developed by academics with an eye towards use in the telcoms industry, its easy parallelism and compact syntax seem to have attracted a new audience. Erlang and the Open Telecom Platform (OTP), make it easy to build applications comprised of many threads free communicating among eachother. It is another tool that changes your approach to coding. Erlang lacks some basic constructs that you find in almosst any “commercial” language. For example, the best way to do a while() loop is through tail recursion.
Databases are another hot topic in the FOSS world right now. MySQL got bought by Sun and Sun got bought by Oracle. Many businesses (like Lokku) rely on MySQL and there is a certain amount of uncertainty out there about its future. For whatever reasons, a number of MySQL forks have appeared. I attended a session on one of these forks called ‘Drizzle’. It is an effort to create a micro-kernel DB ready for scalable deployment in “The Cloud” (more on that later). Best guess is that they will have stable code with a deployed userbase about this time next year. Other groups are taking a different tack and eschewing SQL althogether in favour of databases focused on more particular uses. For example, CouchDB is a documented-oriented database from the Apache Software Foundation and Neo4J is a database optimized for searching graphs. Lots of movement and innovation in this area.
The various keynote talks were a mixed back of predictions and advocacy for various ideas and causes. Getting FOSS into government and government money to FOSS-based companies was a topic of much discussion. Along those lines, Sunlight Labs and others made their case for opening up government data. Seems that the new US administration is moving in a direction that pleases the e-telligensia. Our future also seems destined to bring us smaller devices offering ubiquitious services and more women working in IT in general and FOSS in particular.
The trip to San Jose was definitely worth it for more than just the sunshine and fish tacos. I could certainly see myselfor others from the Lokku team) returning to OSCON in the years ahead.
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We are proud to sponsor the 2009 Perl QA Hackathon. The event is being run by the BirminghamPerl Mongers from March 28th to March 30th. Although we are not sending anyone to the event, we are happy to be supporting the efforts of the Perl community. The Nestoria development team is very big into automated testing and makes extensive use of the excellent Perl QA toolchain that has been built up over the years. Small teams need to rely as much as possible on automation. A big thanks to everyone that will be pushing things forward at the Hackathon. We could not have built Nestoria without your efforts.
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Asusual, Nestoria looking to take in a few orphans and give them a warm place to code. We have space for several interns to join our engineering teams for a period of several months. For those between university terms, this is an opportunity to put aside all that fancy book learning for a spell and pick up some new tricks from the professionals. Got the summer off? Why not come and join us for three months? It’s a paid position and you will learn a lot of things that aren’t in any textbook. For those already out in the working world, this is a chance to pick up a few new skills and see what the start-up life is like while you are between gigs.
We are ready to take in interns at any time. To be worthwhile, though, you must be able to commit for a minimum of three months. Longer internships are possible.
Last night, MTM and myself went in for a bit of matchmaking. A local software guru organized an event for start-ups looking for developers and developers looking for start-ups. It was a bit like speed dating for the nerdcore set. Nestoria are currently in the market for talented contractors to help us build some new and experimental applications on top of our API. We need people that are technically capable (can build and host online applications) and have excellent design and UI development skills (CSS, JS, HTML). The ideal person or team would be based in London and have a serious fetish for neo-cartography. We are of course open to working with those that are more geographically remote and/or less personally intense about maps. The event helped us to generate a number of good leads but if you know anybody that fits the bill and is looking for work please drop us a line.
Avid readers will note that the Nestoria engineering team attended YAPC::Europe 2008 in Copenhagen a couple of weeks back. As usual, the conference featured many interesting talks, two of which were given by members of the Nestoria team. Marc Tobias related some of the lessons we have learned building a high-volume / high-performance ETL system from scratch. His talk was very well attended and sparked some interesting discussions about FOSS ETL and Business Intelligence systems. I (Mike) spoke on a topic of much interest in the Nestoria world – profiling and optimization. As always in the perl world, there are lots of different tools out there and some are more right for the job than others. Encouragingly, many of the best packages are relative newcomers – clarly demonstrating that Perl is alive and kicking. Thanks in particular to Tim Bunce for helping me prepare and for giving me something to talk about.
Conferences are not just about prepared talks, though. You can sometimes learn a lot more at lunch and during coffee breaks. Lots of informal discussions lead me to believe that our development team is doing all of the right things, but that we still have a few tricks to learn. One very notable area of development is distributed applications and cloud computing. Systems like EC2 and Google App Engine are becoming more and more of a fixture in the technology landscape. It remains to be seen how we will integrate these new developments into the Nestoria engine (if all all). There is no doubt that new technologies are presenting many opportunities for building faster, more scalable systems.
Many thanks to the Copenhagen.pm for pulling together an excellent conference. The waterfront dinner was a particular highlight and perfect example of the high level of organization and style that characterized the entire event. Also thanks to Marc Tobias for preparing a few notable images from the conference.
A variety of memorable images from YAPC::Europe 2008
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This is the third summer of Lokku’s internship program, and we have been very lucky to bring in 3 talented engineers. Yoav was the first to join. He is working closely with MTM on a variety of projects related to listing quality and distribution. Croydon Chris – just off his second year at Durham – arrived second. He and Spiros are concentrating on further automating our ETL system. Alistair came all the way from the University of Glasgow and started just yesterday. His six month placement with Lokku is part of completing an undergraduate Masters Degree. Alistair will be working with me on improving and scaling the system we use for listings de-duplication. It’s always nice to have some new blood around to shake things up, and we hope to learn almost as much from our interns as they learn from us.
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As mentioned before, the Nestoria engineering team will be attending YAPC::Europe 2008 where MTM and myself will be speaking. We are also very pleased to now be an official sponsor of the conference. As voracious consumers of free and open source software, it’s good to have a chance to give a little something back and to actively participate in the lively perl community. Thanks to the Copenhagen Perlmongers for organizing what looks to be another great YAPC.
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MTM and I just got word that our talk proposals have been accepted for YAPC Europe 2008. We had a good time at last year’s event and are proud to be actively contributing this time around. I am going to speak about the various Perl profiling modules and MTM will relate some of the lessons learned building a high volume/low maintenance ETL system. Alex and Spiros will also be present in Copenhagen, so the entire team will be taking a break from building new features and concentrating on learning a few new tricks. We look forward to seeing friend old and new in August.
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