Scott Yang's Playground

From Leo Laport: Buzz Kill. It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting [...]

Just tweet about my recent bad experience with VPSLink’s migration from Seattle to Boston (which this blog is hosted on), and noticed that Twitter is not displaying my number of tweets correctly. Saying 828 there but I know very well that there are 3,200+ tweets there, as I ran a scheduled script that backs up [...]

Well. Even our PM Kevin Rudd has a Twitter account (and have more followers than I do, which is actually not surprising :). I guess that at least justifies me spending a bit too much time tweeting — I am just doing what our PM is also doing :) However only being able to tweet [...]

It has been more than 3 weeks since my last blog post, and I blame it sorely on Twitter and I am sure it has nothing to do with my laziness. Hmm. It wasn’t the first that my blog was threatened by Twitter, and you would think that I have migrated to Jaiku already?! Okay. [...]

I have not been twittering much recently because of one and only one reason. That has been on my status page for a few weeks now and I have only been twittering via IM (routing it through my own Jabber server). That sucks. While they have been triumphing the fact they have made it through [...]

Alex Payne, a Twitter developer, talks about its architecture and scalability issue. Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practises that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we’ve tried [...]

Just in case you have not noticed, I have not been blogging here as frequently as I used to be. It certainly feels pretty dead here. During the exercise of searching for the killer of my blog, I found that there has been an increasing activity at Twitter, where I wrote “tweets” on things popping [...]

High Scalability: Making Twitter 10,000 Percent Faster detailing how Twitter, an RoR application running on Joyent Accelerators, scale to its current size. Information obtained from various sources. Interesting point on Erlang: “How do you get a broken server running at Sunday monday with 20,000 users waiting? The developer didn’t know. Not a lot of documentation. [...]

Big thanks to Teresa at The Freebie Blog who sent me an invite to Pownce, the Twitter-killer web application that was created by none other than Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com. Signing up is a breeze — clicking on the link from the invitation email, choose a username, password, fill up a few more [...]

Jeff Atwood commented on the Twitter scalability problem and blamed on Ruby’s slowness. I have quoted from Coding Horror a few times (in my other blogs as well), but I still do not get how his opinions can be so highly regarded in programming community, when he cannot even distinguish between performance and scalability. Even [...]