May 2012
3 posts
1 tag
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
– Confucius
2 tags
SPDY - HTTP evolution, the internet & more
Introduction
As you might or might not know, HTTP & TCP are the protocols of the web. Everything builds upon them. I wanted to write something on SPDY - a Google proposed next-generation application protocol, that’s tries to fix some of HTTP limitations, while being extremely clever and staying backward-compatible. It tries to achieve that by building upon SSL to support “multiple...
3 tags
Redis + Lua for processing JSON values
Redis + Lua for processing JSON values
I love Redis. Its simplicity & attention to minimalism is striking and I find myself right at home when working with Redis. Its no surprise, Redis is one of my favorite open-source project.
Well, you might have heard that Redis 2.6 RC was just released and it has native lua support! Now you might think, what the hell? But trust me, this is awesome....
March 2012
3 posts
Some nice stats on AOL, Facebook, Draw Something
$1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Toyko latency by 60ms;
9 days:
It took AOL 9 years to hit 1 million users. Facebook 9 months. Draw Something 9 days;
~362 sq ft solar array: powers 1 sq ft of data center.
Source
“Tao of YouTube:
choose the simplest solution possible with the loosest...”
– 7 Years Of YouTube Scalability Lessons In 30 Minutes
“Instead of sitting at your computer, and looking at books, go to a drycleaner,...”
– Bob Gill on how to have a good idea
February 2012
1 post
1 tag
Web Scale, Online-Offline Architecture...
Reading about and practicing myself many many architectural styles & pattern, I think I have something rather interesting to share.
I have identified a very standard architecture pattern, most online-offline systems can use (an online-offline system is a word I made up :) that supports both online/realtime & offline processing).
Its not new or anything revolutionary. It just works....
January 2012
5 posts
1 tag
“It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want”
– Steve Jobs when asked what market research went into the company’s elegant product designs
1 tag
“If you think too much, you will make mistakes.”
– Vishal Shah (1/27/2012) while planning with team on a software project
1 tag
Will Amazon's DynamoDB be a game changer?
My answer to this question on Quora -
I am very excited about DynamoDB and I definately think its a game changer. Its killer features are easy to get started, auto-sharding, dynamic scalability per table & proportional AWS costs/billing, in-place atomic updates, both eventual and strong consistency support. But Dynamo has some work set before it can really catch on fire - mostly around...
3 tags
Will Amazon make the Silk cloud backend available...
My answer to this question on Quora -
I for one would think that even if they do open Silk, browser vendors will be less inclined to use it.
Google (Chrome), for example has its own cloud infrastructure, potentially bigger than Amazon’s.
Safari (my current browser of choice) traditionally is very conservative on using any 3rd party services due to Apple’s focus on simplicity -...
1 tag
Managing User Presence, Software Caches, Counters,...
I have so many developers & architect choose the wrong strategy for managing user presence, caches, stats and session information.
My simple advice that works - use redis + expire. Its blazing fast, stupidly simple and very scalable using file syncing and replication and/or sharing.
Don’t try to kludge in using the old school way using sql or custom in-memory hash tables or memcached...
December 2011
2 posts
3 tags
API Design Best Practices. How to attain API...
API Design Best Practices
API’s can be fundamentally important for an organization. However, its use, contrary to popular belief, is not just for external clients & developers, but they can play an important role in building system wide applications & towards an API driven architectural style(more than in a separate blog).
So what are the good qualities to think about while...
1 tag
“Don’t be too much of a generalist where you don’t have confidence is...”
– Vishal Shah, 2011
November 2011
2 posts
1 tag
“Be the change you want to see in this world”
– Mahatma Gandhi
3 tags
What Apple *now* needs to bring even more & better...
Summary
I seriously think that supplementing iOS’ development features to support building native apps via a dynamic programming language like JavaScript or Python/Ruby will change everything one more time. The pace at which developers can then build apps will be phenomenal, and it will further help attract web developers to the iOS’ native platform. Furthermore, this will become...
October 2011
1 post
2 tags
“Vision without execution is hallucination”
– Thomas Edison
September 2011
1 post
4 tags
Android Thoughts, Insights & More
We are very happy with the Ask Android app that we recently launched. I am particularly excited for couple reasons - Android users now have a great way to access Ask.com and our fantastic new Q&A service called Ask People. And secondly, we now have a solid foothold in the Android ecosystem and this to me appears to be just the beginning.
More than just mobile
Android is more than an OS. Its...