Eric’s Home on the Web

Looks like a new startup called Kickfire has thought of a way to improve MySQL query throughput. I know from my previous work how difficult it can be to scale MySQL. Looks like they are considering doing query processing in hardware. I wonder what Venu thinks. It is an interesting way to solve a problem some MySQL users face. However, it really is overkill for 99.9% of all MySQL users. Most of the time, looking at index optimizations, table optimizations and the like will give you a great performance boost — enough to last for the life of your application.

Searchmonkey has launched! Semantic web seems to slowly becoming a reality

We are wrapping up a successful security week at Yahoo tomorrow. It was an interesting conference with lots of viewpoints presented.

Shotguns and Beer

Good quote I read at Yahoo.

So Google released their new AppEngine yesterday a few days ago. Of course, all Technical Yahoos have to check out what the folks down the street are working on. I didn’t take a look at things too closely, but my big question is “OK? what’s the big deal?” So, you can now run code you developed on Google’s hardware in their datacenter on top of BigTable. Would you want to do that?

Second point: is every new web 2.0 project going to need to scale from 0 to millions of page views instantly? Who has that EVER happened to? Digg, Facebook and the other web 2.0 startups run their own serving stack on their own hardware. Sure, they had to endure growing pains, but so did every growing company — including Google.

“Infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake” is cool for the geeks out there wanting to play with some of what google uses behind the scenes (although highly abstracted). But, that’s all I can see the use for. If you are a startup, I would recommend: build a cool product on your own serving stack. Build it right from the beginning with scalability in mind, and then grow your business.

So, Jen and I decided about 6 months ago to start new (for her) characters in World of Warcraft together. I know, I know, we are total dorks. Well, I have finally hit the current level cap of 70 and she is close behind at 69. We have been playing maybe 2 times per week when we have some free time, but it is a fun distraction and somehow, it feels a little more engaging that watching dancing with the american idol stars. Ugh, there is nothing decent on T[i]V[o] anymore. I should make a new post just to get into the G|Y! index the sad reality of television these days. So much for the end of the writer’s strike bringing back television.

Some of you may wonder what I really do at Yahoo since I joined in Sept 2007. Well, here is the brief description. I work in the Core Software Infrastructure Group at Yahoo. We are basically the people who provide the standard Yahoo LAMP serving stack, minus the L (which is another team,entirely). So maybe, you can consider us the AMP [Apache, MySQL and PHP] along with a few other core components that no one ever sees :/ The executive summary is that I don’t touch any user facing code; rather, I handle the software that talks from your web browser to our servers. It’s behind the scenes code that (among other software) makes Y! so fast and flexible.

Wow, I am now a part of the blogging revolution. I suppose I should start thinking of some decent material to have on this site. Eventually, that will happen