Sunday, 28th September 2008
Flickr Engineers Do It Offline. Flickr wrote their own queuing mechanism (in PHP), and currently run ten queue servers on dedicated hardware for tasks like pushing new photos in to indexes, denormalisation and “backfills” which move data between clusters and run bulk scripts against large numbers of existing rows.
James May’s Big Ideas: Come Fly with Me (via) The BBC made an hour-long documentary on Ekranoplans! It’s available for the next 21 days on the iPlayer (UK residents only).
CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS. Nat has published the slides and notes from her BarCamp presentation this morning. I’m really excited about her approach, which involves designing a “CSS system” of markup patterns and CSS that embodies the design of an individual site. Future maintenance can then take this overall system in to account, which is assisted by a defined ordering system and shared vocabulary.