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.
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.
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.
