I’ve been a programmer (if you can call me that) for quite a few years now. But for the most part, it’s really always been about designing software based systems. Even though these systems are larger than the average startup or SaaS company would get to work with, it’s (as I said) still about designing …
By eric
One of the new hotness features that Amazon added to their Elastic Load Balancers is cross zone load balancing. This offers the ability to have an unbalanced number of nodes per availability zone within an Amazon region. For instance, if you were load balances across us-east-1a, us-east-1b, and us-east-1c, then you needed to have the …
By eric
Being a heavy user of Redis has forced some weird Bash-fu and other commands when I want to find out how things are going. Because Redis is single threaded (see here for more information), I commonly run multiple Redis instances per machine. As a result, when running on AWS, I use a specific machine layout …
By eric
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak at the Cassandra World Summit 2012 on August 8 in Santa Clara. It was an amazing opportunity to share with the community the types of things that SimpleReach does with Cassandra. Not only that, I learned a lot about the roadmap and got to put …
By eric
There are a lot of things I really like about Cassandra. But one thing in particular I like in creating a schema is having access to composite columns (read about composite columns and their origins here on Datastax’s blog). Let’s start simple with explaining a composite columns and then we can dive right into why …
By eric
As with any system or application, there are upsides and downsides to using them. The two queueing systems that I want to explore are Resque and Amazon’s Simple Queuing Service. Resque is essentially a set of queuing APIs that run on Redis. Redis is an in-memory data store and is what actually handles the queues. …
By eric
One of the most important things in a startup is having a great culture. More often than not, the team will spend more time working and talking with each other than with their family or significant others (scary thought, but yes, it’s probably true). And I don’t want to harp on the importance of culture …
By eric
There are a lot of reasons to choose a specific technology. You can decide based on what skills you or the engineers around you have. You can decide on a new technology because it’s the right tool. But there are times when all other things are equal and the flip of a coin would suffice. …
By eric
Contrary to speculation by some, Google’s decision for encrypting search data is motivated by the goal to make the web as a whole more secure and it’s not driven by economic interests. I think Google is silently forcing the internet to do what they should be doing on their own.
By eric
If you have read my blog before, you’ll know that I am a big fan of Alfred (here). I love the shortcuts and the ability to make things quicker. One of the things I find myself doing quite frequently is looking for domains and their traffic counts on Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast.
By eric
