I am always fascinated about the cleanliness  of UNIX . One tool only should do one thing, but it has to be the best in that way. The operating system itself will glue all the modules together and give you a complex feel of a system, you don’t have to take care of huge, bloated software, don’t […]

When I joined Pinterest, my first three weeks were spent in Base Camp, where the newest engineering hires work on real production issues across the entire software stack. In Base Camp, we learn how Pinterest is built by building it, and it’s not uncommon to be pushing code and making meaningful contributions within just a few days. At Pinterest, newly hired engineers have the flexibility to choose which team they’ll join, and working on different parts of the code as part of the Base Camp experience can help with this decision. Base Campers typically work on a variety of tasks, but my project was a deep dive into a MySQL performance optimization project.

Pinterest, MySQL and AWS, oh my!

We work with MySQL running entirely inside Amazon Web Services (AWS). Despite using fairly high-powered instance types with RAID-0 SSDs and a fairly simple workload (many point selects by PK or simple ranges) that peaks around 2,000 …

A good portion of the startups I meet and advise want to use the newest, hottest technology to build something that’s cool, but not technologically groundbreaking. I have yet to meet a startup building a time machine, teleporter or quantum social network that would actually require some amazing new tech. They have awesome new ideas with down-to-earth technical requirements, so I kept wondering why they choose this shiny (and risky) new stuff when all they need is a good ol’ trustworthy database. I think it’s because many assume that building the latest and greatest needs the latest and greatest!

It turns out that’s only one of three bad reasons (traps) why people go for the shiny and new. Reason two is people mistakenly assume older stuff is slow, not feature rich or won’t scale. “MySQL is sluggish,” they say. “Java is slow,” I’ve heard. “Python won’t scale,” they claim. None of it’s true.

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A Pattern for a Newly Hired DBA? I don’t think this experience is unique. It has been shared repeatedly among those starting a job as a DBA (database administrator) at a new company, especially when the organization has never had a dedicated DBA. The conversation usually goes something like this: – “Welcome aboard <insert name here>! Here [...] …

In early 2006 Paul Hurley (ideeli’s CEO) and I (Mark Uhrmacher, CTO) were thinking about a new business. We had the idea to create a community based around great deals for Women’s fashion products where we saw a great deal of potential for great content and product sales. Now, over five years later, we’ve realized much of that vision. Our business success has been chronicled over the years in several places (see here and here). Though we’re very proud of our achievements there, that isn’t what this blog is about.

Insatiable Demand is about a mostly untold story. Over the past five-plus years we’ve built a phenomenal technology platform and team. From two people and three servers to a 70 person team and a 100 instance production environment, …

It’s been some time now that we’ve been talking about devops, the pushing together of application development and application deployment via IT operations, in the enterprise. To keep up to speed on the trend, 451 CAOS attended PuppetConf, a conference for the Puppet Labs community of IT administrators, developers and industry leaders around the open source Puppet server configuration and automation software. One thing that seems clear, given the talk about agile development and operations, cloud computing, business and culture, our definition of devops continues to be accurate.

Another consistent part of devops that also emerged at PuppetConf last week was the way it tends to introduce additional stakeholders beyond software developers and IT …

The goals of the project are basically

• Modularity. Make it easier to add new features without breaking existing ones.
• Pluggability. Make it easier for third parties to add functionality.
• …

The goals of the project are basically

• Modularity. Make it easier to add new features without breaking existing ones.
• Pluggability. Make it easier for third parties to add functionality.
• …

The goals of the project are basically

• Modularity. Make it easier to add new features without breaking existing ones.
• Pluggability. Make it easier for third parties to add functionality.
• …

Whenever we are faced with a choice between two designs, and the first design is upward compatible with the second (i.e. the first design is more restrictive, and implementing design two would not affect functionality provided by design one), and the full impliciations of the second design are not yet known, the first design choice is recommended.
Formulated by C.J. Date in "Relational Database: Writings 1989-1991"