Building an iPhone Application - Lessons Building Fiddme

On the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new iPhone app – Fiddme. The process of building our app has been quite an adventure and we’ve experimented with several technologies that were new to us before reaching our current technology stack.
As we’ve finally got our stuff together and made an initial release to a group of testers I thought I’d share some of the technology choices we’ve made and the reasons behind them.

High Performance at Massive Scale Lessons learned at Facebook

Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook gave a great presentation at UC San Diego on “High Performance at Massive Scale Lessons learned at Facebook”. The presentation’s abstract:

What would Twitter do with $100 million?

Last week the NY Times reported that Twitter has raised about $100 million of new funding, making the company’s value to be $1 billion. Just to put things in perspective, they also provide an example:

Moving Your Application to Amazon's Cloud

I’ve been dealing a lot with Amazon’s AWS platform lately. Mostly doing offline data processing using Hadoop but the latest load balancing features finally opened the door for frontend applications to take advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing platform making it easier for developers to make application more cost efficient an scalable.

Facebook, Hadoop and Hive

Facebook has the second largest installation of Hadoop (a software platform that lets one easily write and run distributed applications that process vast amounts of data), Yahoo being the first. It is also the creator of Hive, a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop.

Yahoo Releases Its Own Hadoop Distribution

Yahoo! is releasing its own distribution of Hadoop:

Hadoop is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data.
In response to frequent requests from the Hadoop community, Yahoo! is opening up its investment in Hadoop quality engineering to benefit the larger ecosystem and to increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.
The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop has been tested and deployed at Yahoo! on the largest Hadoop clusters in the world.

New Features for Amazon EC2 - Now You Can Truly Scale Applications

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows customers build secure, fault-tolerant applications that can scale up and down with demand, at low cost. One of the core features for achieving this kind of efficiency and fault-tolerant is the ability to acquire and release computing resources in a matter of minutes according to demand.

A Visit to Maraboo, Restaurants as Tribes in the Digital Age

Its a rare occasion that I go out of a restaurant (and I go to many) with an absolute feeling of “WOW!”… This Monday was one of these occasions.

Weekend Inspirations - Big Data Visualizations, Innovative Man-Machine Interactions

A bunch of interesting/inspiring topics for the weekend…

Designing “Big Data”

Jeff Veen from Small Batch Inc. gave a 20-minutes talk at the Web2.0 Expo at San Francisco.
During the talk he focuses on some classic examples for information visualization (John Snow pump, Minard‘s map, the tube map, and so on), the challenge of making data more accessible and understandable vs. just “decorating” it and the emerging challenge in Web 2.0 to empower users to find and create their own stories using the data.

Microsoft Can Clone Twitter?!

In a response to Microsoft watcher Todd Bishop’s post saying Microsoft should buy Twitter, Mary Jo-Foley wrote Microsoft Shouldn’t Buy Twitter saying: