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PostgreSQL 10 Released. Highlights include major improvements to parallelized queries, quorum commit for synchronous replication (sounds reminiscent of Cassandra) and logical replication, which allows modifications to specific tables to be replicated to different clusters. They’re also changing their versioning scheme to Major.Minor, so the next minor release will be 10.1 and the next major release will be 11.
Feature request: a batch version of mapzen.places.getHierarchiesByLatLon. I’ve been having a lot of fun filing issues against various Mapzen / Who’s On First repositories recently—mainly because the team there are incredibly responsive to suggestions and feature requests. Here’s a fun thread where Aaron Straup Cope and myself have been bouncing around some ideas around batch API design.
Streams: a new general purpose data structure in Redis. Exciting new Redis feature inspired by Kafka: redis streams, which allow you to construct an efficient, in-memory list of messages (similar to a Kafka log) which clients can read sections of or block against and await real-time delivery of new messages. As expected from Salvatore the API design is clean, obvious and covers a wide range of exciting use-cases. Planned for release with Redis 4 by the end of the year!
Should You Build a Webhooks API? (via) We had to solve for pretty much all of these issues when we built Eventbrite’s webhooks—this article would have saved us a lot of time!
This Is What Happens When Millions Of People Suddenly Get The Internet (via) “Countries which come online quickly rank lowest in digital literacy & are most likely to fall for scams, fake news”
Feature Flags, from PyCon 2014. Slides from a 15 minute talk I gave at PyCon 2014 about feature flags - what they are, how to use them and how we implemented them at both Lanyrd and Eventbrite.
This was part of a longer workshop on Advanced Django Patterns from Eventbrite and Lanyrd, which I co-presented with Andrew Godwin and Nathan Yergler.
A Zeppelin, A Cat, and The World’s First In-Flight Radio Message. Tom Scott asked me for “something you might not know” at our leaving party in London before we moved to California. I went with the story of Kiddo the cat and the first attempt at an aerial Atlantic crossing. Here’s the resulting YouTube video.
How we use Redis at Bump. A couple of neat tricks I hadn’t seen before: using Redis to aggregate log files from multiple servers (they all push in to a Redis queue, then one process pulls from the queue and writes to disk), and using Redis blocking queues for RPC by specifying a different temporary queue to return the result.
The New Heroku (Part 4 of 4): Erosion-resistance & Explicit Contracts. I really like Adam’s description of Software Erosion—I’ve seen that happen to my projects a bunch of times, and it really is an important problem to solve.
Visualizing WebKit’s hardware acceleration. Command line flags for launching Safari (and the iOS simulator) in a way that highlights areas of the screen that are being hardware accelerated—particularly useful if you are using the “-webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0)” trick.
On HTTP Load Testing. Mark Nottingham explains that running good HTTP benchmarks means understanding available network bandwidth, using dedicated physical hardware, testing at progressively higher loads and a whole lot more.
We Need to Stop Google’s Exploitation of Open Communities. Mikel Maron from OpenStreetMap is justifiably angry about Google MapMaker, which copies OpenStreetMap’s model of crowdsourcing geographic data (even copying the OSM idea of Mapping Parties) but keeps the data under a much more restrictive license, and uses the Google brand to market itself to African governments.
Why Facebook open-sourced its datacenters. Jon Stokes speculates that Facebook plan to use open source hardware to compete with Google at datacenter efficiency . This isn’t a new pattern. Years ago when I worked at Yahoo! I was furiously jealous of the secret sauce technologies that allowed Google to build big applications faster than anyone else, such as BigTable and map/reduce. Today, the open source world has created better, free alternatives—sponsored in part by Facebook, Yahoo! and other Google competitors.
Qwery—The Tiny Selector Engine. A quarter of the size of Sizzle (1K gzipped and minified) due to only supporting ID, class and attribute selectors. Could be useful for things like embeddable widgets and badges, where depending on a larger library is impolite.
Product design at GitHub. At GitHub, every employee is a product designer.
YC Is Not a School for Startups—It Is Marine Corp Boot Camp for Startup Founders. This is a great description of what it’s actually like to do YC. If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t blogged much over the past three months, this is why.
Your Web, Half a Second Sooner. Google AdSense now serves a tiny bit of JavaScript that loads everything else in a dynamically populated iframe, thus avoiding blocking the rest of the page load. It’s about time online advertising providers started taking page performance seriously.
DNS Prefetching Implications. deviantart use a subdomain per user, which meant the DNS prefetching feature in Firefox and Chrome was costing them an extra 10 billion DNS queries per month. Disabling it with a meta tag saves them $1600/month in DNS service charges.
CSRF: Flash + 307 redirect = Game Over. Here’s the exploit that Django and Rails both just released fixes for. It’s actually a flaw in the Flash player. Flash isn’t meant to be able to make cross-domain HTTP requests with custom HTTP headers unless the crossdomain.xml file on the other domain allows them to, but it turns out a 307 redirect (like a 302, but allows POST data to be forwarded) confuses the Flash player in to not checking the crossdomain.xml on the host it is being redirect to.
Going Postel. Jeremy points out that one of the many disadvantages of publishing JavaScript dependent content on the Web is that a single typo can render your entire site unusable.
Breaking the Web with hash-bangs. Mike Davies explains why Gawker’s new Ajax fragment-tastic redesign is a web architecture error of colossal proportions.
elasticsearch: Percolator. Another fascinating elasticsearch feature: Percolator lets you register searches with your elasticsearch cluster, then pass in a document and have the matching query IDs returned. It’s an upside down search engine. I’m sure there are some very neat things you could build with this, I just haven’t figured out what they are just yet.
UK Web Archive: WW2 People’s War. Good news: the British Library has already archived the BBC’s WW2 People’s War site (on 22nd May 2006).
Erase and rewind. The BBC plan to delete 172 sites from the bbc.co.uk domain, including WW2 People’s War, described thus: “The BBC asked the public to contribute their memories of World War Two to a website between June 2003 and January 2006. This archive of 47,000 stories and 15,000 images is the result.” Appalling.
How we made an API for BoingBoing in an evening. Fluidinfo really is a fascinating piece of software. The team loaded in 11 years of BoingBoing content, allowing you to run structured queries against the data using their standard API, but also allowing users to attach their own information to the same corpus using Fluidinfo tags. Writable APIs are much less common than read-only APIs—Fluidinfo instantly provides both.
Get Lanyrd conference recommendations by email. This is the first time I’ve built a custom email subscription feature, and it’s been a very interesting ride. We’re trying to find the right balance between keeping people informed in a timely fashion with useful information while not overloading their inbox with too many messages. You can opt for daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly emails and we’ll try to ensure you only hear about events you haven’t seen before.
Google APIs & Developer Products. Presented as a sort-of-periodic table. There’s quite a bit of stuff on here I didn’t know about.
37signals Product Blog: We’ll be retiring our support of OpenID on May 1. The support costs far outweighed the benefits to customers, especially now that 37signals have their own single sign in mechanism that works across all of their products.
Tip: Flickr standard photo response as slideshow. Neat trick—you can construct a URL to Flickr’s slideshow widget that includes the results of any API method, including the all-powerful flickr.photos.search. It’s a shame you can’t embed the resulting slideshow in an iframe.
The code injected to steal passwords in Tunisia. Here’s the JavaScript that (presumably) the Tunisian government were injecting in to login pages that were served over HTTP.