Great interview of the guy running Hotmail, he talks a lot about the scaling of megaservices and some of the concerns of managing tens of thousands of boxes. What would you give to hear a similar interview by his counterpart at Google or Yahoo? Fascinating read.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Ping-O-Scratch
It is amazing Ping-O-Matic has handled as much traffic as it has thus far, but it really wasn’t conceived with these levels even imagined. It hasn’t had a good update since it was doing 20-30 reqs/second. Time to rip it out and start from the ground up. I’ll blog about it again when the new system is ready.
Automattic Toni
Another nice birthday present! I have no idea (really) how he got this, but Om has the scoop on Yahoo VP Toni Schneider leaving to join Automattic. We were originally going to announce this at the end of the month when Toni actually left but I guess now is as good a time as any. 🙂 Toni was the CEO of Oddpost and after joining Yahoo led, amoung other things, their really cool developer network.
I first met Toni shortly after I moved to San Francisco and I’ve wanted him to be a part of Automattic pretty much since the idea first entered my mind. We’ve spent many long meals over the past year discussing the Automattic idea before it even had a name. I’ve been on cloud nine since (somehow) I convinced him to leave the incredibly cushy corporate job and rough it out in startup world again. I’m very very excited about some of the things coming down the line.
Update: Toni has blogged about it here. He also has a WordPress.com blog that used to have a bunch of cool cars on it, hopefully that’ll come back somewhere. 🙂
Update 2: It’s on Digg, and I’m curious what linking to the Digg story will do. Digg it if you think it’s interesting.
dotorg
A birthday surprise! The watch I had on PhotoMatt.org came through and now the domain will start redirecting to PhotoMatt.net as soon as the nameservers change over. Now people can stop asking me about that weird .org guy.
Matt 2.2
We’re very proud to announce the final release of Matt 2.2, a full year in the making since the last major release. This version includes dozens of enhancements ranging from DSLR support to the new facial hair module (which we could never quite get to work in previous revs). The knowledge base has been expanded, though it’s still a bit light on the experience benchmark. We’ve also fixed that bug that was around since about 1.7 where it thought the knowledge base was already full. Now it knows more, but knows it knows less. Short-term RAM is still a little flakey. Email processing is also still slow, but the “piano” and “reading” plugins have come a long way. This version also runs without a support contract from a major corporation. Most people surveyed agreed this was a solid upgrade, but we know there’s a lot of work left to do still. We hope to continue listening to feedback and keep up the regular release schedule.
All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.
SxSW Meetup
A tentative WordPress meetup for SxSW is starting to come together, the date and time may change, so sign up if you’re interested. This is also the first time I’ve used Upcoming and I must say it’s pretty slick.
WP.com Performance
It’s nice when people notice these things. There are a few more performance changes planned that may help even more, even while we’re adding more than a thousand blogs every day. Right now we’re in noodle mode, throwing things against the server walls and seeing what sticks. 🙂
Newsforge on WP
Newsforge thinks WordPress 2.0 is better than ever. Aw shucks. 🙂 There is still a lot of work to do still, nice reviews are great but we’re still working our butts off on the next version.
WSJ On WordPress
It’s a new year and new people are using WordPress. On the heels of About.com and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal has launched a new law blog powered by WordPress. Hat tip: Blog Herald.
Home Sweet Home
I’m back in San Francisco. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, except I left at the beginning of December. It has been an exciting month, and I had the pleasure of meeting WordPress users from all over the world in person. I also learned a ton about efficient traveling and getting work done on the road. All great fun, but I am so happy to be back in my own place.
Happy New Year
Happy new year everybody!
Taken on the way to Times Square in New York City.