Please don't use pie charts
I don't like pie charts. I don't like them because they fail to convey information. They do that because people have a really hard time ju...
Facebook's photo storage rewrite
This week Facebook will complete its roll-out of a new photo storage system designed to reduce the social network's reliance on expensive proprietary solutions from NetApp and Akamai. The new large blob storage system, named Haystack, is a custom-built file system solution for the over 850 million photos uploaded to…
Collaborative Map-Reduce in the browser
After immersing yourself into the field of distributed computing and large data sets you inevitably come to appreciate the elegance of Google's Map-Reduce framework . Both the generality and the simplicity of its map , emit , and reduce phases is what makes it such a powerful tool. However, while Google has made the…
Put that database in memory
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
NoSQL Required Reading
Bioinformatics, genomics, and Javascript
What MySQL Founder Michael Widenius said about Oracle acquiring Sun
Tonight at 4:30 AM, USA Pacific time, my phone started to ring; it was a call from a Sun employee saying that Oracle has bought Sun and he w...
Why CouchDB doesn't scale
This is my attempt to clear up some misconceptions about CouchDB and point out some technical details that a lot of people seem to have over...