Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL

Postgres served us well in the early days of Uber, but we ran into significant problems scaling Postgres with our growth. In this article, we’ll explore some of the drawbacks we found with Postgres and explain the decision to build Schemaless and other backend services on top of MySQL. Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres …

Pokemon Locator Apps

With the launch of Pokémon Go, a truckload of Pokémon locator apps/websites have appeared. Fons Van Damme (not related) created Pokemon Locator. And then there’s the more powerful Pokévision (pictured above): Pokevision is a Pokemon tracker/locator for the mobile game Pokemon Go. It uses the Niantic API to grab the location of all Pokemon near …

Transit Maps: Apple vs. Google vs. Transit App

The folks who created Transit App, which sports very nice transit maps: We wanted the prettiness of Apple’s slow solution, but the scalability of Google’s automatic process. In short, we wanted algorithms to draw beautiful transit maps. It’s in the details, people! Transit Maps: Apple vs. Google vs. Transit App →

Fixing HTML Video on Mobile

Samir Zahran on how and why they built Whitewater, an open source video encoder and player for their site: Common HTML5 Video features such as preloading and autoplay are completely missing in some browsers. The scripting APIs are limited compared to what’s available on desktop. Worst of all, Safari on the iPhone (the most popular …

Real–world HTTP/2: 400gb of images per day

Michael Mifsud of 99designs: We began a small-scale rollout for static assets earlier this year. After building confidence in our new infrastructure, we began transitioning our static assets to HTTP/2. Surprisingly, some sections of our platform felt noticeably slower. This post will cover our investigation into the performance regressions we experienced by adopting HTTP/2. So, …

The mobile device lab at Facebook

Insightful post by the folks at Facebook on how they transitioned from testing their apps on a single device to a mobile device lab (holding 1000+ devices) at their Prineville data center. Having tried out several things, they eventually built their own custom racks which not only hold the devices, but also function as an …