Scale with Rails

I went to the Scale with Rails conference last week in Laguna Beach. I didn’t take any pictures of the six of us sitting there with our matching silver macbooks but here’s a picture of Dylan at Hennesy’s on karaoke night.

The conference was really more of a fireside chat. Jason told us about his experiences and was able to give us some rules of thumb about scaling and configurations. This will probably save me some time in the future when I am experimenting with different setups for Spongecell.

I was very interested to learn about DB scaling. Some sites that have proved their ability to grow often have data that is easily partitioned by user. For example, email sites can easily partition data. Google calendar has limited sharing of events. You typically have to copy an event if you want it on your calendar. Spongecell wants better social information so we want people to be sharing events as much as possible. Can we scale and still do this?

On day 2 we did some benchmarking. We also saw dtrace in action. This tool profiles the entire system but currently is only on solaris. Supposedly it’ll be in Jaguar.

I stayed a few days after the conference to enjoy the south coast and work on tanning my receding hair line.

We walked across the border coming back from TJ and even though they x-rayed my bag we still got some fireworks and cuban cigars home.

Tiger Fur

When I’m not using the tall display to show hundreds of lines of ruby code I use it for tiger fur.

Frenchy Le Tech

I went to the French American Tech Connection event last night. Here are my summaries:

http://blog.vpod.tv/
Create your own tv show online! They accept video from anywhere, let you edit it online, and transmit it to anywhere.

http://411sync.com
This is sort of cool. They let other services go mobile easy. For example, kayak made a service for them so if I text “kayak sfo to lax” to 411sync I can get back prices for flights. They were vague about their technology but said they received sms messages using a “sim card hooked up to some other technology.” They denied having a cell phone sitting in their living room that received all their messages.

http://www.soonr.com
These guys make wap apps of your favorite desktop apps. From a wap page on my phone I can use outlook. I think you can edit and create events, they demoed that you can at least delete events. Spongecell needs wap. Soonr also lets you use skype from your cell phone which would be useful for internationals.

http://www.4info.net
They claim to be the google of the cell phone. and to have free form NLP. Spongecell prides itself on its NLP so of course I gave these guys a hard time. I asked for an example of the free form NLP and they said you could query for “sf movies” in addition to “movies sf” and get back the same response. They also gave me a postcard of search terms that were useful. They had a movie playing in the background of someone peeling potatoes with their feet.