There were actually a surprising amount (to me, at least – most of the people I talked to had low expectations) of very good presentations at Web 2.0 Expo last week. Most of them are now posted on either SlideShare (more presentations here) or, for the keynotes, on Blip.tv. This is I think, a very exciting and positive development for industry conferences (which I think will only have net-positive effects on attendance; conference proceedings are de rigueur at academic conferences). Here’re the ones I thought were most interesting.

Keynotes (overall, I liked the 10min What X Knows format that asks companies to boil down numbers and insights):

• Clay Shirky (NYU) – Hands down my favorite keynote of the conf
• What Tellme Knows – loved these numbers
• Tim O’Reilly – standard what Tim is interested in talk, but great if you haven’t heard it
• Max Levchin (Slide) – the affinity anecdote and the discussion of business goals talk is pretty good
• What AIM Knows – the charts are nice as is the architecture slide
• Marc Andreessen (Ning) – wide-ranging conversation that covers a number of historical and current topics
• What Current TV Knows – people like watching themselves on TV! The first half is better than the 2nd.
• What Dash Knows – good to see driving collective intelligence actually working
• What WP Knows – some good WP numbers
• Jonathan Schwartz (Sun) – wide-ranging conversation on hardware/infrastructure
• Scott Berkun on Innovation – if you haven’t heard his spiel, there’s a nugget or two in there
• Fake Steve Jobs – overly long, but the core story, about 15min in is good
• What MySpace Knows – only interesting part is about 50s to 2min to see the #s slides

Lots of awesome sessions, the quality of the presentations (primarily in terms of prep/interestingness) was higher than usual:

• A Flickr Approach to Making Sense of the World – my favorite session of the conference. If you’re doing “geo stuff,” you owe it to yourself to take a look at this. The divisive hierarchical agglomerative clustering bit is great (using morton curves for better pathing, clever). Now there’s not a lot on reverse-geocoding, which I believe I am now doing unique and interesting work on — once I prove it works, I’ll have to publish/present about that. 🙂
• Capacity Planning for Web Operations – sure you can’t clone Allspaw, but reading what he has to say is probably the next best thing.
• Website Psychology – linking to an earlier version of Gavin’s talk (with notes, yay) – he does a really great job mapping cognitive psychology concepts onto site usage and development. Well worth reading and thinking about
• Grasping Social Patterns – by far my favorite Ignite talk this year, all kinds of hooks for thinking about how far social apps and the “social graph” needs to go
• Making Email a Useful Web App – Bots are awesome and underrated. I’ve been working a lot more w/ them recently and this was a good overview (would love an even more comprehensive history of cool bots…)
• Even Faster Website (PPT) – Steve Souders (now at GOOG, doing the same sorta thing he was doing at YHOO) talks about the current stuff he’s working on, which is optimizing JS (the logical progression). Great new stuff, just as useful as the older stuff
• Adding “Where” to Mobile and Web Applications – a bit basic, but a good overview of how location stands today. Come to Where 2.0 and Wherecamp to learn more…
• Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics – slides not online. Boo-urns
• Casual Privacy – slides not online. Boo-urns
• Next Generation Mobile UIs – slides not online. Boo-urns

Talks I didn’t make but that have interesting decks:

• Tagging: Opportunities & Challenges of Scale – Kakul gives an interesting overview of tags, growth patterns and future directions (super-interesting stuff) at Flickr. Unfortunately, there was a conflict so I couldn’t make it, but it looks pretty darn interesting; would be interesting for an open source library to support typing via machine tags, and clustering (I assume Flickr just k-means on photos w/ “tag”)
• Why Startups Need Automated Infrastructures – this conflicted w/ Kellan’s talk otherwise I woulda been there; building my own one of these right now…
• Startup Metrics 101: a Product & Marketing Workshop – this densely-packed deck that is chock-full of info. great overview from a business-metrics perspective
• Failure Happens – fun talk on what HA means lots of infrastructure details (colo to deploy stuff mostly)
• Copy as Interface – Erika Hall gives lots of specifics on writing gooder for the web
• Customer Service Is The New Marketing – great slides and clear/focused message
• The Dark Side of Ajax – great overview/analysis of XSS/CSRF problems with AJAX and a looking at which JS frameworks are addressing issues
• Cross-Cultural User-Experience Design – great list of references, very interesting comparisons
• Open Platforms in Web 2.0 – highlights the big story of 2008-2009: really being able to write your brilliant additional feature w/o having to rebuild everything; tying together services and the social context…
• Do Try This At Home – interesting FE hacking; looks like this would definitely benefit from audio/preso notes
• Announcing Project Z – open dialogue and deliberation framework? looks potentially interesting. This was the type of thing I was very much into a few years ago.
• Mobile Ajax and the Future of the Web – actually has useful dev tips
• Blogging for Personal Branding – interesting seeing insights from an actual pro-blogger (not like pro-bloggers I know, but the people actually writing about specific topics)
• Designing Your API – a couple interesting tidbits from both sides.
• Triggit – the most interesting LaunchPad demo
• RIA Offline Desktop – decent overview of AIR and Gears
• Mobile 2.0: Design and Develop for the iPhone and Beyond – megalong overview on mobile web; this was a tutorial session, which I was sort of at, but mostly busy working through

Some stuff that sounded interesting but don’t have slides online: include Marc Davis’ Mobile talk, Opportunity Computing in the Cloud, Social Networks and Avatars (caught a few min of this, looks like they haven’t done a lot of work on the numbers (even organizing across cohorts), but still would like to see the deck), Global Design Trends (there are slides, but only enough to wish you had a recording of the talk)

Some bonus talks if you’ve made it through all those:

• Alternate Realities – Jane McGonigal gave one of my favorite keynotes this year @ SXSW
• Evaluating visual cues for window switching on large screens – a pure HCI talk on UIs once you have wraparaound screens (ie 3 widescreen LCDs). pretty awesome.
• Real World Web: Performance & Scalability, MySQL Edition – Ask gave a great talk at MySQL 2008 – a little bit of everything in this 🙂
• Collective Intelligence Indeterminacy and the Illusion of Control – on “sociomimetic” technology, w/ a 3pt rubric for evaluation

Did I forget something (quite probable), miss one of your favs? Post links in the comments.

Clay Shirky gave the best keynote talk that I caught at Web 2.0 Expo last week. He’s posted a transcript, entitled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus on his new book’s site (also quite recommended; it makes it onto my “understand the internet” bookshelf).

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

If you didn’t catch it, this is well worth reading.

I know it’s never good to pay attention to the nattering classes, but there was a pretty high profile fusillade that Mike Arrington launched on Blaine Cook which seemed to bring out the arm-chair experts in full force in the comments. Now, while I think that Arrington’s post is way out of line (I’ll explain that in a bit), I’m almost not as bothered by it (as long as he’s not to bothered for being called out on it)… What really bugs me is the number of clueless “developers” throwing in their two cents. That includes Arrington’s two Rails developers with “finger on the pulse of the rails community” (ha!). My discontent was further exacerbated by this (unrelated) completely clueless piece on The Register. Is this the best that tech journalism has to offer?

First, a disclaimer: I don’t know Blaine very well, and I don’t have any privileged info on Twitter or Obvious Corp.

There’s no question that Twitter has and continues to suffer from capacity, load, and other stability issues, and pointing that out is fair game, however pointing at Blaine’s scaling talk as a personal dig is a disservice to the everyone, especially since:

1. The advice in the slides are generally good (and the “It’s Easy” is obviously snark – just look at the failcat in the next slide; it’d be easy to confirm that by asking anyone who was in the talk (like me or several hundred other people) instead of projecting prideful boasting to justify his attack — I’ll avoid ascribing motivations to why Arrington chose to do this).
2. More crucially, the slides themselves point to the issues that a proper tech journalist would be able to spot and follow up on to try to find out what was really going on (assuming he cared about that).

For example, 600 QPS on 8 machines is pretty decent – but this raises the question of utilization and capacity planning. You can see from the 1×1 MySQL structure and the note on DRb that there were many single points of failure – again, this raises questions of BCP and redundancy. With the constant bumping of limits, you could guess that they were running really hot (and from a single data center, even after the move (probably w/o backup routers, etc.)) — all these issues are as much (if not moreso, since these are technical no-brainers) business/financial decisions than architectural/technological ones.

Now, I don’t know what happened between ops, management, and engineering, but guess what? Arrington doesn’t either, and he never bothered to follow up and kicks Blaine in the head instead, even when such clues obviously raise significant doubts about whether it’s appropriate. I agree with Arrington’s point about accountability, which is why I say now that Arrington wasn’t posting journalistically (the minimal followup with someone w/ half a clue would have pointed out exactly what I did), and Blaine deserves an apology. If you’re gonna shit on someone and start pointing fingers, you better have the goods to back it up. Whiny, uninformed personal attacks belong on Arrington’s Live Journal or (wait for it…) Twitter stream.

Now, onto the retarded comments from wanna be developers. Well first, of the entire thread, I only saw one half-decent attempt at a technical critique, and even that falls down when you look at it. I don’t want to belabor the point, but the poster, Jordan, actually raises technical points worth addressing (and refuting):

1. On indexing: while it’s true you don’t want to index willy-nilly and it’s incomplete to say “index everything”, if your ORM isn’t automatically indexing frequently used keys, you can be sure as heck that you’ll want to make a point of indexing them, especially if you’re doing joins. Yeah, you don’t index what you don’t need, but even if you have frequent writes, you need to eat it if you’re ever going to ever query. Because people suffer from lack of indexes, unless you’re not adding an index and examining, you’re not gonna have a problem “over indexing.” I don’t know the exact fan-out/pub-sub architecture, but you can be sure you’ll be doing a lot more reads even if you cache the hell out of it. If you’re thrashing, you’re looking at having mis-configured index caches more than anything else.
2. DRb: This is a case where it looks like he just misread. It’s easy if you don’t have the context of the talk. DRb was good enough… until it wasn’t – which is why Starling was written to replace it. Now, we still don’t know if it’s a single point of failure, but it obviates that whole rant (as to why DRb was chosen in the first place, more on that later)
3. Caching: again, the same thing with indexes. Of course over-caching is bad, but that’s never going to be your problem because you start with no caching, and you add caching until you start losing performance. Also, the “no substitute for fixing the underlying problem” is naive – most of the time, your problems are that there’s no need to do complex queries or processing since the data doesn’t change and should be cached. durrf.
4. Profiling: ok, this I’d sorta agree with. Mentioning ruby-prof would probably be good, but honestly, 90%+ of optimizations can be done on simple timers, explains, and logs alone. (And also, performance tuning doesn’t have all that much to do with scaling anyway.)

As to the rest of the wannabees, it really is true that if you haven’t done it, that is: been intimately involved growing a social web app from prototype to Internet-scale on a UNIX stack, then you really don’t know shit. (I know more than my fair share of people that have, and I didn’t see any of them posting armchair bs on the comments). I’m not trying to say this just to be dismissive, but only to say, you really really, don’t understand the technical challenges involved. Generating target sets on social objects is extremely expensive and ill-suited to traditional 4NF data models in RDBMSs. So is social activity fan-out and any number of activities core to Twitter’s message routing/storage and to social web apps in general. These are not traditional problems and standard, HA solutions just aren’t available.

Even if you’re architecturally sound, you’re dealing with development with extremely tight timelines/pressures, so you have to make decisions to pick things that will work but will probably need to eventually be replaced (e.g. DRb for Twitter) — usually you won’t know when and what component will be the limiting factor since you don’t know what the uses cases will be to begin with. Development from prototype on is a series of compromises against the limited resources of man-hours and equipment. In a perfect world, you’d have perfect capacity planning and infinite resources, but if you’ve ever experienced real-world hockey-stick growth on a startup shoestring, you know that’s not the case. If you have, you understand that scaling is the brick that hits you when you’ve gone far beyond your capacity limits and when your machines hit double or triple digit loads. Architecture doesn’t help you one bit there.

And the people that have experienced this and lived to tell the tale also know that it’s impossible to critique the technical/operational aspects made w/o seeing and understanding the QPS targets, load graphs, profiling data/sar info and all manner of other architectural/technical data and details (that none of us are privy to) before commenting with any sort of authority.

Anyway, if you were given the choice of working with/hiring someone like Blaine who has had the firsthand full life-cycle scaling experience and any random developer (and definitely anyone from the TechCrunch comments), I think it’s fairly obvious what the right decision would be. I guess I’ll leave it at that.

This leads to Part Deux of my rant… this lead-paint baby of an article entitled Backlash starts against ‘sexy’ databases which has the following quote, I shit you not:

“The bottom line is don’t tell me RDMBS [sic] can’t scale if you can’t write a decent query or design a normalized database schema.”

This is by one John Holland. Now, no doubt the WordPress code can be pretty shitty (although sometimes there are good reasons for the multiple queries to support various hooks/plugins), but you will never hit the type of performance problems in a WP (non-mu) installation that have people looking for MySQL alternatives because WP just doesn’t have the types of queries that destroy RDBMs.

I can understand that it’s not the article author’s (Phil Manchester) fault for conflating the “cons” with arguments that WP is badly coded with the “pros” (correct!) that you can’t write the kinds of queries you need for social apps because if he’s like the reporters I know, he probably doesn’t actually understand it at all and is doing his beat writeup, but dammit, can’t the author get some decent frickin’ technical advisors to explain this if he’s doing tech journalism? The entire article is based on characterizing a misinformed blog post as a “brewing controversy.”

I mean, I don’t want to be more mean than I have to about this, but John Holland just has no idea what he’s talking about. He picks up on Atwood‘s post on WP inefficiency, and then uses that to (completely incorrectly, and not without a tinge of reverse elitism) generalize on why the “cool kids” are hyping non-relational data stores. He goes on to boldly state “Relational databases are not the bottleneck” due to his complete lack of understanding of the actual problem set (hint: I don’t know anyone who’s suggesting WP should be switched off MySQL). This then leads to a horribly ignorant article being published by a writer who is in the best case, lazy and doesn’t understand what he’s reporting (just show two equal sides and do a writeup) or in the worse case is simply looking for a manufactured conflict that only will serve to stir controversy and confuse the non-savvy reader.

(The reasons for alternative data-stores actually exist in a couple axes – one is for more development flexibility or the ability to change functionality w/o expensive downtime (schemaless), one is for issues of scale and availability (distributed), and then a whole bunch for supporting social queries that just are horribly suited to RDMSs (multi-attribute, inverse index, mq/pubsub, etc.). Many of the alternatives are a combinations of various axes.)

No language is perfect, and Python is no exception. In Python 2.4, for example, sorting a list of lists sorted by a value in the nested list (more common than you’d think), requires a bit of work and a library:

import operator
max = sorted(list_of_lists, reverse=True, key=operator.itemgetter(1))[0]

Python 2.5 makes things easier:

max = max(list_of_lists, key=lambda x: x[1])

The official Python Wiki has a nice HOWTO on Sorting in Python (also a much less comprehensive one on sorting dictionaries).

(note: OS X Leopard comes w/ Python 2.5 while, Debian Etch remains on 2.4 by default)