Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by staunch on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @02:07PM
(#5745497)
Brad Fitzpatrick is one of the most interesting programmers to watch. He's written a dozen really interesting and useful pieces of code. Whatever he's working on is probably worth your attention. Right now he's working on Go at Google.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by atomicstack on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @03:19PM
(#5746097)
Yes, another of his inventions (or something he was at least involved in implementing) is Gearman (http://gearman.org/), a queue/worker system which I used in my last job at a domain registrar/web host to hack up parallelised domain name look-ups. Similar to memcached, it was ridiculously quick and easy to set up and use, and bought me massive efficiency gains with very little implementation cost.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by look_lookatme on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @11:57AM
(#5744526)
I followed Brad on LJ around this time, a time before I learned to program but was into running Linux/FreeBSD on my desktop and taking multiple unsuccessful stabs at building things. I remember his post about memcached:
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by gpcz on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @01:06PM
(#5745044)
It's interesting to see that the idea came to him while taking a shower, similar to Clifford Stoll's "Operation Showerhead" idea that took down Markus Hess. I wonder how many of the world's most important inventions were thought up in a shower...
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by smcnally on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @02:47PM
(#5745859)
This conversation came up within the last week, though I forget where: Rather than being "thought up" in the shower, the shower is more likely the place where the idea seeps into the conscious mind. We're generally in the shower after a night's sleep. During that sleep, we're working through thoughts, ideas, problems. Before we can make use of that processing work, we need it to be accessible to the waking mind. The shower is a place that wakening happens frequently.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by laumars on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @08:45PM
(#5748078)
Sometimes it's a case of ideas popping into our heads when we've relaxed our minds from the problem. eg Some of my best ideas come to my while I'm on the toilet because I can be staring at a piece of code for hours and not find the fault. But the act of walking away from the problem and relaxing my brain for a few minutes is sometimes all that's needed to see the problem from another angle (and thus stumble onto the solution).
It's the same reason that I used to have a bath whenever I'd get stuck on a college assignment.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by samworm on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @12:09PM
(#5744616)
Memcached actually turns 10 tomorrow - Wed 22nd.
I consider memcached to be one of the most important programs of recent time, it has been a core component for almost every large scale website you can think of. Ubiquity isn't always synonymous with quality, but in this case it clearly is.
Its incredibly powerful and very easy to deploy. A great piece of work, one that has saved my sanity many times, and congratulations to all involved.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by nvr219 on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @12:56PM
(#5744963)
I miss LiveJournal so much. I was so reluctant to leave it but with all my irl friends migrating to Friendster and then myspace I had no choice. Privacy settings were easy, friend management was easy, desktop client was easy (and powerful). RIP
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by Legion on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @12:59PM
(#5744999)
I agree with this a lot. LJ by its nature encouraged writing, not just status updates. It was a much more interesting - if sometimes drama-filled - read than my Facebook news feed is with many of the same people.
Also, LJ groups have not been successfully replicated by any of the other major social media networks.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by jseliger on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @02:24PM
(#5745667)
LJ by its nature encouraged writing
Wordpress does the same, which is why I primarily use it and not the innumerable alternatives.
I think the desire to do long-form writing, especially regularly, is a relatively rare one, which is why we see most people migrating to sites that mostly do images / sound bites / etc.
But the people who do do long-form writing will probably always be with us and probably always need tools appropriate to that genre. I don't know much about the history of LJ or why /how Wordpress supplanted it for long-form writers, but I do know that WP works pretty well for me, or at least well enough that I haven't seen any alternatives good enough to consider switching.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by jlgreco on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @02:06PM
(#5745494)
Even if DVC lacked the D, the concept of versions being a DAG was an incredibly important. A very big improvement to how classical CVS systems have developers think about history.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by nostrademons on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @02:02PM
(#5745468)
Wikis. Who woulda thunk that a website that anybody can edit would actually work, let alone become an important component of the web and most corporate intranets.
HTTP. The protocol is not that complicated, but it's become ubiquitous, and a cornerstone of the web.
Social news. Nowadays everybody takes links you can vote on as a "duh" feature and wonder what the big deal behind Reddit is, but when it came out in 2005, it was very much a "Why has nobody thought of this before? Oh, right, because nobody will ever use it" invention.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by papsosouid on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @02:58PM
(#5745922)
>Nowadays everybody takes links you can vote on as a "duh" feature and wonder what the big deal behind Reddit is, but when it came out in 2005, it was very much a "Why has nobody thought of this before?
It had been thought of before, and done before. The late 90s had tons of sites like that. When reddit came out in 2005, it was very much a "what is so special about slashdot clone #437?".
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by nostrademons on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @03:04PM
(#5745956)
Didn't slashdot have you vote on the comments and not the stories, and the stories were still picked by editors? I think that was what was new about Reddit and Digg...they were just user-submitted stories and nothing else.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by papsosouid on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @03:12PM
(#5746029)
Yes, but everyone had told them over and over again to change that, they just wanted to maintain control. It certainly wasn't a new invention of diggs, I just used slashdot as the example of reddit being a clone because slashdot was the most well known. kuro5hin was(is?) exactly digg/reddit for example. Social bookmarking sites were around before slashdot too.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by atomicstack on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @03:10PM
(#5746007)
The other thing that nobody seems to have brought up is the forks, descendants and similar pieces of software it inspired in one way or another: e.g. memcachedb, Tokyo Cabinet, Redis, etc. Memcached's release was very much a watershed moment.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by NamTaf on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @08:17PM
(#5747980)
Here is the canonical presentation about Brad's fun with scaling Livejournal (including memcached). It's still a good read even now if you want an introduction to the whole topic:
edit: Think about the number of decade-old pieces of software still used almost universally because they're still one of the most effective solutions in their field. That is what makes me appreciate memcached most of all.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by anatoly on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @02:11PM
(#5745538)
I wrote most of the initial C server. Brad helped with code reviews, some bug-hunting, and IIRC he wrote the first version of the slab allocator. Prior to using the slab allocator, we tried straightforward malloc (thrashed under load due to fragmentation) and Judy arrays (didn't scale).
Brad handled the Perl client (initially the only client), and I think we hashed out the protocol together. I was an employee at LiveJournal at the time.
(I want to emphasize that the credit for the _idea_ of memcached belongs 100% to Brad)
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by evmar on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @03:02PM
(#5745938)
Anatoly is too modest to say it, but he deserves credit for being the author of memcached as people know it today. Which isn't to say Brad stole the credit or anything like that, but rather to note most successful projects involve more than one person.
Re:Memcached turns 10 years old today
by jchrisa on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @07:14PM
(#5747715)
Memcached is the ancestor of the front end for Couchbase, so while we regularly come in as one of the most consistently fast NoSQL databases, we can't take complete credit for that (other than picking a great foundation).
https://github.com/bradfitz
https://twitter.com/bradfitz
http://brad.livejournal.com/1893677.html
I didn't really know what he was talking about but it was really fascinating and inspiring (as a lot of his tech posts were).
It's the same reason that I used to have a bath whenever I'd get stuck on a college assignment.
Same as sometimes when driving as I'm not focused on work can bring about good ideas.
I consider memcached to be one of the most important programs of recent time, it has been a core component for almost every large scale website you can think of. Ubiquity isn't always synonymous with quality, but in this case it clearly is.
Its incredibly powerful and very easy to deploy. A great piece of work, one that has saved my sanity many times, and congratulations to all involved.
-quasidan
Also, LJ groups have not been successfully replicated by any of the other major social media networks.
Wordpress does the same, which is why I primarily use it and not the innumerable alternatives.
I think the desire to do long-form writing, especially regularly, is a relatively rare one, which is why we see most people migrating to sites that mostly do images / sound bites / etc.
But the people who do do long-form writing will probably always be with us and probably always need tools appropriate to that genre. I don't know much about the history of LJ or why /how Wordpress supplanted it for long-form writers, but I do know that WP works pretty well for me, or at least well enough that I haven't seen any alternatives good enough to consider switching.
Do you have similar other obvious ones in mind? (please no rails :-)
And, Thank you very much for making memcached, and happy birthday! I've used this as a core part of my stack for years and love it.
edit: clarity
Not obvious to implement. But the concept was obvious.
HTTP. The protocol is not that complicated, but it's become ubiquitous, and a cornerstone of the web.
Social news. Nowadays everybody takes links you can vote on as a "duh" feature and wonder what the big deal behind Reddit is, but when it came out in 2005, it was very much a "Why has nobody thought of this before? Oh, right, because nobody will ever use it" invention.
It had been thought of before, and done before. The late 90s had tons of sites like that. When reddit came out in 2005, it was very much a "what is so special about slashdot clone #437?".
We ($dayjob) have been using it in production and it has been _solid_. twemproxy is quality engineering.
[1]: https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy
http://www.danga.com/words/2005_oscon/oscon-2005.pdf
edit: Think about the number of decade-old pieces of software still used almost universally because they're still one of the most effective solutions in their field. That is what makes me appreciate memcached most of all.
Brad handled the Perl client (initially the only client), and I think we hashed out the protocol together. I was an employee at LiveJournal at the time.
(I want to emphasize that the credit for the _idea_ of memcached belongs 100% to Brad)
https://github.com/memcached/memcached/commit/d4b68a8eca39e6...