Posts

Recently at work people are discussing the merits of different cache servers. That brought back memories of my days as the R&D Product lead for a line of cache systems. The high point was participating in the two week “Cache Bake Off” hosted by NLANR (the team broke off and formed The Measurement Factory. This was great fun where engineering teams from major companies got together to have thier systems pounded in a no holds barred performance test. I was working for a hardware company that had thier sights firmly set of being the leading tier two vendor (Tier one was considered too competative to take exponential growth risks). I think my gear nailed it by achieving 80% of the performance of the leadning brand at 1/5 the price. (And you could cluster 2 for less then half the cost and have over 50% better performance - if you order now you can get fee overnight shipping). ...

I recently purchased a ‘pre-forclosure’ townhouse and it was cluttered with a serious amount of stuff. My first thought was to rent a dumpster and hire some movers to help me empty the house. That would have cost about $6-$700. I’ve been seeing the 1800 Got Junk trucks around the neighborhood so I thought I’d give them a try. The website was excellent with a design and IA that allowed me to quickly accomplish what I came there to do. I setup an appointment for the next business day and got a price estimate. ...

The joys of home ownership pressing demands at work have stifled my personal innovation time. Sometime in the last millennium I used be enjoy writing exploratory projects and releasing libraries that others may find useful. Over the last few months I’ve been looking for inspiration for a project that would help me explore some ‘search’ related ideas that have been bouncing in my head. I came across a project idea that represents the perfect personal trifecta! ...

Agility is one of the most abused terms in my profession. Recent events in my day job have caused me to rethink what agility means. We have a very elegant, loosely coupled system that allows us to build entire sections of our website in hours. The framework handles everything from CDN integration to doing automated profiling every build. Software engineers have to be good at identifying the bottleneck, and over the past few days I saw how the larger teams ability to react mattered much more then the codebase itself. ...

I thoroughly enjoyed the Iron Man movie. My son wanted more of a SpaceMarine clunky feel to the armor, but I though they nailed exactly how I saw Iron Man from my youth. At least half the theater stayed past the credit roll, I was surprised by how many people knew about the extra bit. It took some real willpower to sit through the endless list of names after consuming a super giant-sized soda and getting to a 2 hour movie 45min early ...