Brent Sordyl's blog » architecture

Startups are Creating a New System of the World for IT

Brent Sordyl — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:29:57 +0000

One reason for this revolution is explained by Etsy in terms of Conway’s Law:

When a team makes a product the product ends up resembling the team that made it.

I’ll extend this notion to say the team and thus the product end up resembling the underlying technology used to make it. When you change the underlying development infrastructure, by moving to a cloud, you are bound to change teams and processes they create.

(Full Story: Startups are Creating a New System of the World for IT)

Pinterest Architecture Update – 18 Million Visitors, 10x Growth,12 Employees, 410 TB of Data

Brent Sordyl — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:29:53 +0000

80 million objects stored in S3 with 410 terabytes of user data, 10x what they had in August. EC2 instances have grown by 3x.

(Full Story: Pinterest Architecture Update – 18 Million Visitors, 10x Growth,12 Employees, 410 TB of Data)

What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

Brent Sordyl — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:42:48 +0000

Most of our data (users, photo metadata, tags, etc) lives in PostgreSQL; we’ve previously written about how we shard across our different Postgres instances. Our main shard cluster involves 12 Quadruple Extra-Large memory instances (and twelve replicas in a different zone.)

We’ve found that Amazon’s network disk system (EBS) doesn’t support enough disk seeks per second, so having all of our working set in memory is extremely important. To get reasonable IO performance, we set up our EBS drives in a software RAID using mdadm.

(Full Story: What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies)

The top 9+7 things every programmer or architect should know – Java Code Geeks

Brent Sordyl — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 13:11:58 +0000

1. “You don’t have to make every module perfect before you check it in. You simply have to make it a little bit better than when you checked it out.”
2. “The bottom line is that beautiful code is simple code.”
3. Step Back and Automate, Automate, Automate – Cay Horstmann
4. Continuous Learning – Clint Shank
5. Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others – Allan Kelly
6. Hard Work Does Not Pay Off – Olve Maudal
7. Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say – Kevlin Henney
8. Know Your IDE – Heinz Kabutz
9. Learn to Estimate – Giovanni Asproni
1. Understand The Business Domain – Mark Richards
2. Before anything, an architect is a developer – Mike Brown
3. Find and retain passionate problem solvers, Give developers autonomy, Empower developers
4. It’s never too early to think about performance – Rebecca Parsons
5. Record your rationale – Timothy High
6. Stand Up! – Udi Dahan
7. Great software is not built, it is grown – Bill de hora

(Full Story: The top 9+7 things every programmer or architect should know – Java Code Geeks)

Anatomy of a Crushing – Pinboard.in Blog

Brent Sordyl — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:18:43 +0000

It was my experience that people approached an online purchase of six dollars with the same deliberation and thoughtfulness they might bring to bear when buying a new car. Prospective users would hand-wring for weeks on Twitter and send us closely-worded, punctilious lists of questions before creating an account.

(Full Story: Anatomy of a Crushing – Pinboard.in Blog)