My trip to Berlin in 10 little items

1. Berlin first impressions: it's great to be a walker there;
2. 15 Portuguese people on Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, that I know of;
3. Berlin's public transports are great, but it's somewhat hard to get used to them;
4. The idea that Portuguese hospitals are a lot worse than other European countries isn't quite true: they are worse but not that much;
5. You have to love Berlin's traffic lights;
6. German people have something against double beds, maybe it's something that comes from Jewish traditions?
7. I hoped that music there was cheaper, but that's not quite true: average price at 17.50 €. On the other hand, every store is better than any music Portuguese music store I know of regarding stock quality. Plus, they have quite a lot more percentage of stuff in vinyl;
8. Movies and Books, specially books, are obscenely cheap there, comparing to Portugal. And their bookshops' are awsome. And it seems that adiobooks is the next big thing there...
9. If you're to go there, remember: go to the DDR museum and the cinema museum. If to choose one of those, choose the first.
10. It was great being there, and mind-thrilling too. There's a lot of new stuff gereminating in my mind... You might see the results sometime.

What is Web 2.0: The Rules for Creating Successful Online Products in the 21st Century

"Hey, Google is announcing today the GPhone" - great way to wake up the audience :-) The thing is, he didn't need it, he's a great speaker... ( the slides will be on slideshare after web2.0expo).

Nice talk about mashups and remixing... It also shows quite well that you can compare web stuff to music stuff, and the concept behind web 2.0 is exactly what's now starting to happen to music... So yes, music 2.0 is quite a nice definition.

Key web 2.0 design patterns

• The Long Tail


• Users Add Value


• Network Effects by Default


• Some Rights Reserved


• The Perpetual Beta
• (not that I like his "definition" of beta...)


• Cooperate, Don't Control


• Architecture of Participation

Creating services is the big thing, not applications... (Compare creating a "Blogger" to having a blog...)

He told about how to deploy a wiki in a company, something that gave me a smile, but his example can be applied to a lot other stuff... As a matter of fact I think that any web application should be deployed more or less that way, and if it doesn't have success than the application sucks, not the deployment method...

He said that it is illegal to download an youtube video... I had this discussion once, I really have to double check this again, but I think it is not illegal. Anyway, content needs to be open. Companies shouldn't be worried about "how do I take my valuable data out of Google?", they should be earning money out of it by opening up and make money by giving that data...

Ahem... Defining bandwith as what empowered the web 2.0 boom is commiting a mistake... That's like vertical scaling: and a major fuck-up if you consider the bandwidth you have in the mobile web...

He just described (without knowing) why half the people that has an oppinion about Google's personal search results think it is bad: they're taking into account what they think they know about one user, instead of using the network effect and the wisdom of crowds...

If you create something that already exists, as it is, but if it is more easy to use, people will switch to your app...

Everyone has a mobile so it's potentially on the web... mobile web is one of the next big things...

He tells something I completely disagree: "the best online products and services [...] iTunes, Sony CONNECT, Zune Marketplace"... Yes, he knows that COnnECT is dead, but even if he considers Zune Marketplace as a "copycat" of iTunes, iTMS website is completely not a "best online product", it even isn't good!

"Nobody needs to ask permission to anyone to create an aggregator" (talking about the model of the blogosphere)... Once again, I have questions about the correctness of this sentence (even if I think it should be that way), I've discussed this a couple of times and I would really like the sources for that sentence...

Challenges of RIAs:

• Loss of page views (ajax'd stuff makes you be everytime in the same page...)


• RIA content is non-cawlable (sometimes, breaks SEO)


• stop breaking the browser (using standards would fix that...)

This notes do not describe at all this presentation, so you should go and download it. This ended being only personal notes for future reference...

Questions/Slides: dion(at)hinchcliffeandco[dot]com

Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches

Ah, I'm having a great time in Berlin! But instead of a personal blog post, this is a "live blogging"-like post. These are my notes on the "Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches" workshop Cal Henderson (Flickr) gave. As you'll see in this and future posts, this isn't me talking about the workshop but just the notes I took from it...

---

-- Stuff you have to care about...

• * What is scalability
• * Traffic growth
• * Dataset growth
• * Mantainability
• * High Availability
• * Performance

-- Scalability

• * Vertical (get bigger)
• * Sometimes is alright... quicker... and sometimes less expensive, if the software isn't written for H-scalability or when rearchitecting it goes more expensive than to buy just "more RAM" or somthing
• * Horizontal (get more)

-- Architecture

• * finding the right balance for good/fast/cheap

-- App servers

• * state and sessions? please no sessions or at least not local sessions, if you want a scalable app... -> store in a central database, instead of using sticky sessions

• * no sessions can be implemented:
• - stash everything in a cookie
• - sign the cookie
• - using a $timestamp you can easily see when the cookie expires
• * "super slim sessions"
• - no account info in the session (use the previous cookie) but you can fetch database stuff and stuff it in a
• "super slim session"
• * the ramsus way - architect your app so that app servers don't know about the other servers,
• so they can scale horizontaly without problems

# presentation
# markup
| page logic
| business logic
$ database

• * Availability - everything doubled, if you can re-double it in another datacenter

-- Amazon

• * S3 - storage
• * EC2 - compute
• * SQS - queueing
• * all scale horizontally, it is cheap when you're small, it's not really cheap with scale

-- Load balancing

-- Parallelizable == easy

-- Databases

• * usually the hardest part to scale (unless we're doing a lot of file serving)
• * when starting, vertical scale should be used
• * usually you need (specially on web) more read power than write power
• - database replication (writes go to master, reads go to master or slaves)
• - this sucks when you need to scale writes, 'cause you'll have to add a lot of new slaves to be sleeping...
• * caching avoids needing to scale
• * About MySQL clusters: MBD allows a mesh, RSN will be great in an upcoming version

-- Federation (at this moment we're talking about /big/ scaling)

• * Simple things first: divide your tables and put each slice in each cluster

-- Akamai...

-- Serving Files

-- High Availability

• * RAID 5 is cheap, RAID 10 has speeeeeed! ;-)
• * MogileFS
• * FlickrFS ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/flickrfs/ )
• * Amazon S3 (cheap!)

-- Field Work

( iamcal.com/talks )

Berlin, here I go

Wow, what a couple of days. I've been preparing everything, both at a professional an a personal level, and I've been really really busy. The few free moments I had this last couple of days were dedicated to work some more on my musical project Merankorii [1].

I'm going to be in two birthdays of two close persons (one in Portugal, the other already in Berlin), maybe (but I doubt) a quick visit to Barcamp Berlin [2], then Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2007 [3], where I count to meet a lot of cool people, besides the obvious conference itself. If you're also going to Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2007 [3] and want to meet me, just indicate so in my Web 2.0 Berlin profile [4]. I still don't know about monday, but tuesday I'll go to the Berlin at Night party [5], and wednesday to 1st Girl Geek Dinner Deutschland in Berlin [6] and maybe an Elis concert [7]. Thursday is the last day of the expo, so after it I might visit (at last!) K17, and assist to a somewhat random gig [8]. The rest? Well, I'm going to be there until sunday, so I want to use the time to rest (a lot) and visit the city. Thanks to a friend I have a cool guide of the city, but I still have to look it for more than 30 seconds... The only thing I already know is that the guide has a section of cool music stores, so I'll probably do some shopping :-) Also, I'll follow some of the recomendations you people left here on the blog (thanks!) and by e-mail.

Taking into consideration the quality of the stuff I want to attend at the Expo and the number of people I want to talk to and that wants to talk with me, I think I'll probably won't have the change to liveblog the event, nor even to do such an in-depht summary as I did for XTech last year. Still, you should expect some notes on this blog from monday to thursday.

[1] - http://www.reverbnation.com/merankorii
[2] - http://barcampberlin2.mixxt.de/
[3] - http://berlin.web2expo.com/
[4] - http://web2berlin.crowdvine.com/profiles/6095
[5] - http://berlin.web2expo.com/conference/berlin-night.php
[6] - http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/240276/
[7] - http://www.last.fm/event/214616
[8] - http://www.last.fm/event/289216

Tell me about Berlin!

Dear Lazyweb:

I'm going to be for the first time in Berlin, and I don't know nothing about the city. Can you please give me some hints about what you think I must visit? Also, I'm looking for hints about:

• Good music stores;
• Good music/alternative nightclubs (to see what kind of music I'm looking for check out http://www.last.fm/user/Mind_Booster/ )
• Good Jazz clubs
• Every stuff you might want to add ;-)

PS -> If you're in Berlin or are going to be there from the 2nd to the 11st of November and want to know the person behind this blog, tell me ;-)