Gowalla ⇒ Facebook

Scott Raymond, co-founder and CTO of Gowalla confirms the rumors: It wasn’t an easy decision, but Facebook has always been a friend of the company, so joining their team is a natural move. I’m incredibly excited to work alongside folks that have already changed the world pretty profoundly, and who have an even bigger vision …

BozoCrack MD5 Password Hash Cracker

BozoCrack is a depressingly effective MD5 password hash cracker with almost zero CPU/GPU load. Instead of rainbow tables, dictionaries, or brute force, BozoCrack simply finds the plaintext password … via Google. Specifically, it Googles the MD5 hash and hopes the plaintext appears somewhere on the first page of results. It works way better than it …

The Instagram Server Stack

This is how our system has evolved in the just-over-1-year that we’ve been live, and while there are parts we’re always re-working, this is a glimpse of how a startup with a small engineering team can scale to our 14 million+ users in a little over a year. What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens …