Sharding & IDs at Instagram

With more than 25 photos & 90 likes every second, we store a lot of data here at Instagram. To make sure all of our important data fits into memory and is available quickly for our users, we’ve begun to shard our data—in other words, place the data in many smaller buckets, each holding a …

Browser Market Pollution

Paul Irish on how our future as a web developer will look like. Worst part yet: the (predicted) 10 versions of IE you’ll be supporting, sound more like 72 versions (if things keep going as they are going now). Maybe drinking beer at this point in the post would be a smart move. The browser …

If PHP were British

When Rasmus Lerdorf first put PHP together, he opted for that bastard dialect of the Queen’s English commonly referred to as “US English”. PHP developers in Britain have been grumpy about this ever since. What was he thinking? And more importantly, how do we undo this travesty? An attempt to adapting the PHP syntax to …

Future Friendly

Future Friendly is a manifesto / call to arms for making sure that our strategies for technology, design, and content will work fine on today’s and on the next-gen devices. While we can’t know exactly what the future will bring, we can: Acknowledge and embrace unpredictability. Think and behave in a future-friendly way. Help others …

Job Application

Carsonified is looking for a designer. What caught my eye are the instructions on how to apply: Design and code a 1-page ‘dashboard’ app for your life. Pretend it’s an app that you view/edit these stats: Heart rate Drinks consumed Food eaten Hours slept Highfives received Please create a logo and name for the app. …