Simon Willison’s Weblog

How the Digg team was acquihired. (via) Useful insight into how a talent acquisition can play out from Will Larson, who was an engineering leader at Digg when they negotiated their acquihire exit.

# 3rd January 2020, 2:27 am / will-larson, startups, digg

Digg’s v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity. Riveting behind-the-scenes story of the disastrous Digg V4 launch by former Digg engineer Will Larson.

# 2nd July 2018, 5:25 pm / will-larson, digg

Looking to the future with Cassandra. Digg are now using Cassandra for their “green badge” (one of your friends have dugg this story) feature—the resulting denormalised dataset weighs in at 3 TB and 76 billion columns.

# 9th September 2009, 9:26 pm / cassandra, denormalisation, nosql, digg

(Yet) Another DiggBar Update. Digg are responding in exactly the right way in my opinion—the DiggBar will start returning 301 redirects for anonymous users, while users who are logged in to Digg can opt-out of the feature if they want to (usage statistics show that most Digg users are fine with the feature).

# 16th April 2009, 12:50 am / digg, diggbar, urls, redirects

Digg Search: Now With 99.987% Less Suck. Really nice implementation of faceted search, still using Lucene and Solr under the hood.

# 10th April 2009, 10:17 pm / search, lucene, solr, digg, facets, full-text-search

Introducing Digg’s IDDB Infrastructure. IDDB is Digg’s new infrastructure component for sharding data across multiple databases, with support for both MySQL and memcachedb. “The DiggBar and URL minifying service is powered by a 16 machine IDDB cluster, which includes 8 write masters in the index and 8 MySQL storage nodes.”

# 3rd April 2009, 8:42 pm / joe-stump, databases, digg, iddb, memcachedb, mysql, scaling, sharding

New Gearman Server & Library in C, MySQL UDFs. Gearman, the job queue written for LiveJournal and now used by Digg and Yahoo!, has been rewritten in C. Looks like a good candidate for an easily configured lightweight message queue. Also includes hooks for writing MySQL functions that can interact with queues.

# 13th January 2009, 4:41 pm / mysql, message-queues, digg, gearman, livejournal, queues, scaling, yahoo, eric-day

Dissecting today’s Internet traffic spikes (via) Theo Schlossnagle on how the increasing popularity of interest aggregation services such as Digg and Reddit result in traffic spikes that dwarf the old Slashdot effect, making a the old rules of thumb for capacity planning irrelevant.

# 29th June 2008, 2:12 pm / slashdotting, reddit, digg, theoschlossnagle, capacityplanning, scaling

Quantcast top 100 US sites (via) The vast majority of the top 100 attract a more female than male audience. Digg is one notable exception.

# 23rd December 2007, 9:43 am / quantcast, advertising, demographics, digg

Techniques for safely consuming external HTTP on demand? I asked this question on programming.reddit.com yesterday and got some really insightful answers, including Joe Stump from Digg describing how Digg Images uses Danga’s Gearman worker queue.

# 15th December 2007, 12:29 pm / http, queue, workers, gearman, reddit, askreddit, joe-stump, digg, danga, scaling

SlideShare: Webapps scalability. Lots of great presentations on scaling, from Twitter, Digg, Vox, LiveJournal, Last.fm and more.

# 4th July 2007, 12:53 am / slideshare, vox, twitter, digg, livejournal, sixapart, lastfm, scaling

Digg to drop their global “top users” list. It’s fascinating how big an effect a simple feature like a top users list can have on the social behaviour of a site.

# 2nd February 2007, 6:03 pm / socialsoftware, digg

digg: Screencast: How to use OpenID. No exclamation mark this time—let’s see if it makes a difference.

# 22nd December 2006, 9:50 pm / digg, openid, selfpromotion, screencast

digg: HOW TO turn your blog in to an OpenID. Trying to get some digg love for my OpenID how-to. I even used a digg-friendly exclamation mark.

# 19th December 2006, 12:36 pm / digg, openid, selfpromotion