For the last few weeks we’ve been busy growing the team and making some enhancements to blist. I’ll use this post to provide a quick update.
Earlier this week Mark joined the team as director of user experience. Until now we had relied on a few visual and interaction design consultants to help put a face on blist and they’ve done a great job. One of our goals is to democratize working with data in large part through breakthrough innovations in usability. It’s precarious to indefinitely rely on consultants for a function that we consider a core competency and key differentiator. From day one we’d wanted this critical function in house and we’re thrilled to have Mark aboard. It’s ironic, because we tried to hire Mark a year ago but I couldn’t articulate the vision well enough at that time to pique his interest. Throughout the year we’ve kept in casual contact and were finally able to bring him in. Mark holds a masters degree in design interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelors in environmental design and architecture from the University of Colorado. I’m thrilled to have him on the team and hope you’ll join me in welcoming him to the team.
Over the last three or four weeks we’ve slowed new feature development in order to focus on improving stability, boosting performance, polishing existing features and making the first use experience of the application more enjoyable and positive. We’re pretty happy with the progress to date on all four of these fronts, but we’ll continue to focus in these areas for another week or two.
For the first use experience, we’ve been working on providing more guidance to get new users up and running quickly. For example, we’ve created a video on creating your first blist, written a getting started topic guide and added a “Getting Started” section to the blist dashboard, which is now the home page when blist starts.
These are really fun times at blist. The team is growing via the addition of a handful of remarkable people. The application continues to evolve. It’s incredibly fulfilling to see the interesting and productive ways in which people are using blist.
Last night Paul & I went to a talk at Google’s Fremont (Seattle) campus on the future of cloud computing. It was a great talk about Google’s core technology assets - GFS, MapReduce and BigTable - and the open source re-implementations of those same technologies - Hadoop and Hbase. Aaron Kimball, UW computer science grad student and founder of Spinnaker Labs, gave a great presentation that was well attended by 100 or so folks who are interested in Internet scale computing.
It was a good, high level overview, which stimulated some good questions and discussion. Among the more interesting things I noted last night include:
*) The optimal profile for a server in a compute farm doesn’t require a lot of top speed CPUs nor should it be packed with RAM. The bottleneck is getting the data from the disk. A 2.4 Ghz 1U server with 4 CPU cores, 4-8 GB of RAM and 2 SATA disk drives (as fast and big as possible) is best.
*) There was some discussion about the performance delta between Hadoop and Google’s technologies. A great point was made that in the long term grand scheme of things, the delta is irrelevant. MapReduce represents a paradigm shift as signficant as the shift to client/server programming 2 decades ago. This approach is likely to be the norm for batch processing of very large data sets for 20 or 30 years to come.
*) The time and overhead of starting up a MapReduce job means that it really is inappropriate for processing datasets under 20 GB.
*) Cycles and bytes, not hardware, are the new commodity.
*) As more technology companies like Amazon and Google provide temporal, on demand access to large compute farms it has the effect of democratizing distributed computing.
*) Hadoop has stabilized significantly over the last year. Hbase needs another 6 months to reach the same level of maturity and stability.
*) There was some minor disagreement about whether virtualization is a foundational prerequisite for cloud computing. In an Amazon Web Services model where different external customers are commissioning and decommissioning servers often, virtualization is mandatory. In the case of internally consumed Internet scale compute farms like the ones Yahoo and Microsoft use exclusively for their own needs, virtualization isn’t a prerequisite.
*) Aaron characterized how SmugMug is building their business on Amazon Web Services. He made an interesting observation that SmugMug has effectively become a value added reseller of S3.
Thanks to Aaron for conducting this talk and to Google for hosting it. As you would expect for Google, there was a great spread of appetizers, beer and wine for the event. It was personally surprising and rewarding to see Aaron highlight blist in one his slides. Aaron was making a case for the web replacing the desktop and pointed to GMail, facebook, Google Apps, meebo, flickr and blist as examples. Hey, I can’t complain about keeping company with this group of innovators.
I admit to being a little over the top about the observance of traditions. I try to find mundane events that can evolve into traditions. My kids think I make the routine ceremonial. Getting a haircut is a big deal at my house. We buy our Christmas tree from exactly the same Christmas tree lot every year. There will be warm orange rolls for breakfast and little smokies for half-time on opening day of the football season.
Yesterday was Paul’s one year anniversary at blist. He brought in a pound of fudge to share. He says he’s starting a new tradition at blist. Each year on your anniversary you need to bring in a pound of chocolate times the number of years you’ve been working at blist. A startup has much in common with a family. You learn a lot about each other. I’m learning that Paul is as geeky about tradition as I am.
Paul’s first year at blist has been phenomenal. He’s a major contributor to both the above-the-surface part of the blist application you see and the below-the-surface infrastructure you don’t. He’s an incredibly diverse software engineer, working all over the stack. Paul is a big picture, long term thinker, which we appreciate. Some software engineers are afraid of hardware and systems administration. Not Paul. He’s physically touched virtually every piece of gear we have and he keeps all of our systems humming. Paul’s been instrumental in building the team by keeping the hiring bar high and genuinely doing a great job of identifying people who can make big, meaningful contributions. blist would be no where as far along today if Paul hadn’t left Microsoft to join us.
So thanks for a terrific first year Paul. This is just the beginning.
I do think if Paul succeeds at spreading the pound of chocolate tradition among all employees, we’ll be incorporating yet another new tradition at blist - the weekly Saturday morning 5K to keep in shape.
