David Rice

So I'm going to start off with a couple of caveats. I love Twitter, I met the guys responsible and they're wonderful and smart as feck. A lot of people have came out and publicly bashed Twitter a lot for it's scaling woes, applying blame and all that horrible stuff. All I can say is that I'm betting the agile nature of how they developed, grew and launched didn't uncover the size of the problem until it was too late. It's what I like to call a "Cluster Fuck". Trying to keep Twitter running, day to day operations, customer service and all of that stuff must take away from being able to work on re-architecting.

This is personally a big deal for me being so fond of Ruby, having to deal with the whole "Rails Doesn't Scale" FUD that is generated by Twitter's current reliability is a daily occurrence. It's exactly why I gave a presentation at Barcamp Belfast to try and address this. No matter how many hundreds? thousands? of production Rails applications that are out there working away like power-horses, the one kinda unreliable example (Twitter) is reused as troll bait all the time.

Mythbusters Style

• Rails & Ruby do scale.
• Anything scales, it just costs time, money and smarts.
• Ruby is such a "glue" that scaling is easy, easy to replace parts.
• But it will always be really difficult trying to fundamentally change a working machine.
• The more previous scaling work that has been applied will impact the effort needed to re-architect.
• Rails & Ruby are easily scaleable with some open source loveliness for 98% of cases, Twitter is not one of those cases.
• There are endless techniques to solving performance problems!

What Twitter Should be (and Probably are) Doing?

The problem with Twitter is that there is too much stuff going on in the database and Ruby for something as complex as message routing. Not taking any big leaps to judgement but as far as I can guess, when a user posts an update they have a trigger that replicates the message for the followers of that user. That works for a while until you get people like Scoble joining, imagine if Twitter was REALLY popular around the world, eek!

I'm going to bet that they approached building Twitter from a typical social network point of view, it's what I would have done. If however it's looked at from the perspective of existing technology like message routing and e-mail then it would lead to a different architecture.

Almost all of twitter can stay in it's current guise, but instead of just having ONE database (well there's two slaves) and memcached for caching. Think of it like E-mail, each user has their own database, like an inbox.

In the recent Q&A with techcrunch they said they are working on an "elegant filesystem-based approach" which to me sounds very similar to what I'm thinking of when I say inbox. So with this implementation in place, the load on Twitter's main database would be drastically reduced, with all those tweets in inboxes for each user.

There are also a load of developments going on in the Ruby community that could be applied (soon) to the twitter architecture to make scale even better.

• Faster, Better, Stronger... Virtual Machines from the Rubinius and Maglev teams
• Asynchronous processing with a little bit of Erlang love from Ezra (one smart cookie @ Engineyard) called Vertebrae
• Engineyard are putting their money where their mouth is and funding a lot of projects these kind of projects, karma.

Anyway, I wish the Twitter crew the best of luck. I can't wait till it's finished. Oh yeah and spread the word, Ruby does scale.

Heading to Rails Conf 2008 last week was great, such an energy it was hard to describe. I met some really great people I knew and lots I didn't, if I haven't started following you on twitter yet I'm sorry, huge stack of business cards to sort through still.

Anyway one of the main themes of the conference for me was that a lot of the speakers were talking about this idea of choice and how it is good or bad for us.

When DHH was speaking he talked about this at length, how Rails has been designed to remove choice from the framework. Having good defaults is very important for the ease with which new developers can pick up the framework and run with it. Now with a completely countering opinion when Ezra was speaking about Merb during one of his talks, it's designed around choice. There is no default ORM you need to choose one yourself.

So what does this mean on the large scale, I think we as humans really value choice. It's a natural thing to want and the removal of it sets off all kinds of Neanderthal warning bells in my subconscious mind. How can I love Rails so much then? It's design being so opinionated and communist at times, forcing you down the "Golden Path", well;

1. The choices made are good ones.
2. I trust the people making the choice will make good ones in the future.
3. I am always able to look at the choices made, understand them and make my own decision.
4. Being Ruby, my personal choices of implementation are inexpensive to change.

A couple of people I talked to at Railsconf where talking about Merb as a Rails killer, DHH made a really great point in his keynote that the Rails Killer "will need to be about 10x faster" and it's so true. For me I don't think there is an argument they're both awesome tools, having the choice to use one or the other doesn't hinder me. So in my mind, I don't think choice is bad a thing, only choices that are difficult to make are. (Yes I'm looking at you Microsoft Windows Super Pro Home Mega Ultra Special Gold Edition...)

Exceptional is a product I've been thinking about for some time, so it is really exciting for me to say "Hey, it's almost ready for Beta" so if you would like to try it out, please go ahead and sign up. What is it? It's a combination of a hosted service and a rails plugin, every time an error happens in your production application the plugin tells us about it. We're then able to;

• Notify you when "shit happens"
• Not overdo the notifications
• Allow you to choose from many different forms of notification (email, sms, twitter, im etc.)
• Comment on errors to interact with the production support team e.g. "I'm working on it..."
• Provide meaningful descriptions for errors that can be displayed directly to the user
• Allow users to send in extra detail about what happened, right when the error occurs
• Automatically communicate with users when an error they experienced is resolved
• Integrate with workflow tools like trac, lighthouse and fogbugz

All of this and more coming soon, if you have any questions or feedback I'd love to hear it.

So I've completely moved over to using git the awesome version control system by uber geek Linus Torvalds after being told about it by uber geek in his own right Matt Keenan in great (and might I say, confuzzling detail at the time). I've moved all of my public source code over to github, you can check it here. Will be updating all articles that reference the old repository and taking it offline this week!

Okay so things are gathering pace with the Co-Working Belfast initiative, here's a little round-up of what happened this week;

• Andy registered a domain for Co-Working Belfast.
• Andy booked a viewing for the potential space he found.
• We went to visit the office on Bradbury Place.
• We found a couple of other spots that didn't quite meet the criteria on a second walk around the Botanic / University area.
• We put an offer in for the space (see below).
• Darryl from Banjax gave us a load of advice, info on what people to contact about funding and even invited Brendan McGoran from Belfast City Council to the next open coffee meetup.
• We visited Blick Studios and met with the studio manager Christine James, we had a good chat and have a potential space if getting somewhere larger doesn't work out.

The Potential Space

• Brochure (pdf)
• First Floor Plan (pdf)
• Second Floor Plan (pdf)

The advertised vital statistics are as follows;

• 1900 (sqft)
• Rent at £8.50 (per sqft)
• Rent is therefore £16,150 p.a.
• Rates 2008/2009 £6,873
• Service charge (unknown)
• To be refurbished pending lease finalisation

After viewing the space it is definitely in need of a good bit of love so we made what I think is a fair offer, along with some extra conditions;

• At the lessor's cost, an architect to visit the property to asses what if any walls could be removed to make the individual offices larger.
• Re-paint walls and ceilings with a clean, matte white finish.
• Laminate wood flooring laid in the office areas.

The offer itself £10,000 p.a. for a 3 year lease. Some light mathematics and it's going to take around £60,000 over the next three years to make this a reality. I think we can do it.

Next Steps

So, the list I published at the end of last month we've managed to cross some things off and there are couple of things I would love to ask you to do, if you can answer any of these questions. Please leave a comment!

• Do you want a desk at Co-Working Belfast?
• What about just being able to drop in and use spare facilities?
• Would you be willing to put your money where your mouth is and chip in for the deposit?
• If we said it was going to be up and running next month... are you in?
• Can you provide any desks, chairs, monitors, computers?
• Do you have any good funding leads?
• Can you help in any way that I haven't mentioned above?

This week I will collate all of the feedback I get and use it to prepare a funding proposal, work out the cash flow, budget for setup costs and as usual tell you all about it. To wrap up, I'm just really looking for help here it was tough alone and now even with all the awesome stuff Andy has been doing and Darryl's advice it's actually getting harder. So please, step up, we can do this but only by co-working towards a common goal (I'll leave you with that awful pun).

Okay so the idea is to setup a not-for-profit organisation with the remit;

Bringing silicon valley thinking to Belfast by creating a cutting edge work space for digital and creative workers. It's goal is solely to improve these industries and provide a creative atmosphere to allow ideas and companies to grow in an organic way.

UPDATE: Woo! 2 more people interested that brings the total to 18.

When my lovely second hand Netgear Rangemax router died I bought one of these new fangled AirPort Extreme Base Stations from Apple with the logic that;

• Hey it's Apple it'll just work with the rest of my computers
• It will be fast as f* thanks to the 802.11n
• It will be able to handle my ever increasing download traffic
• I was wrong...

Update: So apple have finally fixed this issue in the airport extreme update (firmware version 7.3.1) released last wednesday. I installed it straight away and have had no issues at all, huzzah! Thanks apple, finally I can say I recommend this product.

Last night I gave a wee presentation at the Ruby Ireland meetup. A quick lighting talk on some SSH tips and tricks, with some Unix fun for added measure.

• Slides (pdf)

There was a bit of discussion and a couple of other links were mentioned;

• Managing local Rails versions
• Aliases (for your command line)

Having run out of (obviously?) rushed presentation material I stuck Howcast on screen and let the questions begin. There were a load of really great ones from the group so I hope it was even a little bit interesting for you!

I have waited for this moment for so long, it's great to finally be able to say that Howcast has launched! The culmination of hard work over the past year by such an excellent team has produced something that I for one am really proud of. Now perhaps that makes me slightly bias but I do think it is the best how-to site, possibly the best online video site around. Anyway, go check it out! If you want to find out more before the jump, the video below gives a great introduction to what Howcast is all about. If you want even more info, check out the company blog.

Some time soon I will be sharing some more intimate details about the whole process and experience of building Howcast (NDA permitting :)), but is there anything you want to know?

There are a lot of government bodies in Ireland devoted to improving the creative & tech industries, here are just a few of them;

• crea8ivity - Northern Ireland's Digital Hub
• Invest Northern Ireland
• Enterprise Ireland
• Momentum - The Northern Ireland ICT Federation
• Creative Entrepreneurs Club Northern Ireland
• National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts

They are all doing something which is better than nothing, but there is so much more we could be doing if we want to capture the same atmosphere of creativity and entrepreneurship that exists in silicon valley. I'd just like to note here that Enterprise Ireland are far ahead of the game locally, there is still a lot they could be doing but they put their Northern Irish counterparts to shame.

Invest Small, More Frequently

The traditional approach is to provide the investment, funding, grants, cheap office space and other perks to the largest companies like the Apples and Googles. These guys are mostly in it for the tax breaks, not our elite college graduates no matter how the smoke and mirrors try and reflect the situation. The fact that these companies are generally provided with incentives proportional to the number of jobs they will provide changes the prerogative of these companies, they don't need to be super efficient, small and agile as it's encouraged to be a behemoth.

The truth of the matter is that Google and Apple (and insert name of other successful tech company) all started small. The kinds of numbers that used to be needed to form and run a company are constantly being reduced through application of modern principles and great industry advances like utility computing. This all directly equates to reduced initial costs to just get out there and start a business to see if the idea works. In Silicon Valley the attitude is to just go for it, Venture Capitalists will fund a hundred small companies because odds are a lot of them will fail, some will be marginally successful and a couple will make them minted. It's probability 101.

Take the Pain Away

I have talked to many would-be entrepreneurs and some of them just can't make the leap to quitting their day job, be it for family or other money related reasons. If you could give this person just enough so they could take 6 months to a year off and help towards expenses you have just created another potential business.

Also don't make your potential entrepreneurs do such merry dances and jumping through hoops. Make it simple to apply and attain funding.

Build Communities

Now what is really interesting is that I see people on the grassroots level doing such a far better job of building communities than those paid to do that exact job.

• Over the past year there have been regular OpenCoffeeClub meetings in Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Galway and Belfast
• There were 4 BarCamp conferences in 2007 in Ireland (Belfast, Dublin, Waterford and Galway).
• The Paddy's Valley trip to Silicon Valley of 26 (or so) Irish entrepreneurs was a phenomenal success. Ask anyone else who went and they will tell you the same.
• The Coworking initiative has had great success, they managed to pull together 4 freelancers to start an office in Dublin. I've been a guest there numerous times and the atmosphere is so exciting.
• Paul Walsh has put on some great tech evenings for startups to practice pitching, cleverly named Curry 2.0.
• Techludd has quickly become the most successful and best attended event in the Irish technology industry. Setup by Anton and Jessica after being inspired by Paddy's Valley.

Now the important thing about all of these burgeoning communities are the people involved. What they have achieved in building these social networks is astounding, the big difference is that these communities have been totally based around the people that attend them and completely lacking in the Business Bullshit that tends to shroud more conventionally organised events. Such relationships have built up, business deals made and just general good craic has been had since their inception. Government bodies take heed or you will quickly become obsolete, start coming to events like these, maybe even fund a couple of them. Lets not rest on our laurels but make 2008 an even better year.

Start a Real Digital Hub

There are government funded digital hubs springing up in many different places in Ireland. They are generally new builds with spacious offices and great technical specs but their priorities are in the wrong place to really help the homegrown industry flourish.

• These digital hubs are generally structured to provide large spacious offices, with small tech startups this is not needed.
• They are generally located outside of town, away from the creative, cultural and innovative areas that entrepreneurs want to be.

Taking the Northern Ireland Science Park in Belfast as an example, it is located near the upcoming Titanic Quarter. Cheap land for building large capacity offices, more space for more bums on seats see a pattern forming? It might be a hub, but not now give it half a decade. Anyone that knows Belfast would agree that the Cathedral Quarter, Queen's Quarter or even the Linen Quarter would be a better suited venue for a hub of any kind.

There are several routes to the goal of creating a Coworking space in Belfast but the main hold up is getting enough totally committed freelancers and startups to make it a reality. What would really ease the pain would be funding from one of the government bodies to create such a place. Just enough to get going as I believe if you build it, they will come.

Questions?

What I want to know is, after reading that do you have any questions? Any ideas on how we can push forward with some of these ideas in Ireland? If you do I'd love to hear from you.

I'm going to post soon about how Universities fit into this picture, it was too much for one article.

What a mouthful, it's a worse name than techludd. It is actually the title of an event run by crea8ivity on Tuesday of this week. Now, if you've looked at their site you may see where I'm coming from when I say that the majority of the content is utter "Business Bullshit". Which kind of gave me a correct view of what the event would mostly be like, mind you there were positive points too.

After some brief introductions Tom Loosemore took the stage to deliver a talk Welcome to the New Digital Era. From the start it wasn't particularly interesting for someone that has seen the internet before, albeit I do think he'd just drawn the short straw on this one and quickly showed his smarts in the parts that strayed from the presentation topic. Especially the one about being more open about data services and apis, we can build more beautiful software, only if we become good web citizens. Rock on Tom.

From the BBC Emma Somerville talked to us about some of the different projects they were doing on the web and also some different strategies they had applied. That's all well and good, but you are the BBC. Doug Richards would later point out that we all don't have a radio and tv monopoly and can't benefit from such free and available advertising. He had another beautiful thing to say that "The BBC should not be the monopoly producer of creative content it should be a monopoly consumer of content from outside bodies." wow, wouldn't that just shake up the industry in the UK.

We then got a talk about the New Digital Innovators from Northern Ireland from the project director of crea8ivity. This was to introduce one of the main reasons behind the evening which was the demo of a couple of companies that the crea8ivity initiative had funded. I believe they each got slices of a tasty £1 million pie and the rest was put into launching the crea8ivity project. Enough history. Here are the list of projects that were displayed on the night;

• Edcast Medical
• StreamOn.net
• Sonic Academy
• Awash on the Web
• Constant Comedy
• iGolfPro
• Dark Water Studios

Okay so one of the companies StreamOn, provide the systems for Edcast Medical, the Sonic Academy and Awash on the Web. They've done pretty well out of the initiative bagging all those projects, I just can't get over the fact they're selling "streaming video web solutions" when they are not offering streaming video solutions, it's progressive download. There's a big difference, please internet stop bastardising this definition. My other main gripe is their use of Microsoft Publisher which means wmv videos, if you can't be bothered to deliver your content in universally acceptable formats (flv anyone?) then I and a lot of other users probably can't be bothered to watch it (YES I CBA installing a wmv player!).

The three clients of StreamOn definitely need to discover the power of free, there's no way I would sign up to any of those sites just based on first impressions. What I wanted to see on the front pages of each of them is a big freakin teaser video, then you might capture my attention enough to make me fill in the form. By requiring registration before a user can derive that there may be any potential benefit from a site you put up barriers to entry, you need to show them what they're missing.

Check out Constant Comedy great site, great idea made me laugh. They may be going places.

Dark Water Studios fair play lads, how you managed to build a game development studio in Derry. Perhaps I will never know as you guys were swamped after the talks. Great to see.

There was this iGolfPro thing there as well, it seemed pretty cool technology but it really didn't have anything to do with the web at all. Fail.

So that's the new digital innovators from Northern Ireland not to be harsh but none of them are the next google, Constant Comedy and Dark Water Studios have a good chance of making it into prime time. I'd love to see the rest of them be successful too but they'll need to change some things first.

Back to Doug, it was really a breath of fresh air to hear someone just go for it and say what they really think. I can't even remember all of his keys to success but that's not important, the important thing was to hear how passionately he talked about doing amazing things with the web. One girl asked a question, she basically wanted to find out how she could have some private time to give him a business pitch. I think she almost died when Doug made her stand up and give an elevator pitch to him in front of the entire assembly. Fair play to crea8ivity for getting such an interesting speaker to an event in Belfast.

So to round up it was great to see at least something happening locally in the web space even if it wasn't exactly what I wanted to see... A lot of the event felt like being in high school during a sex education lecture by a teacher too old to be having never mind talking about sex without making those younger than them feel horribly uncomfortable. That's what it was like hearing Crea8ivity talk about the web. Too many suits, too much back patting for a job well done and not enough really getting to know people. Crea8ivity you did a fair job putting this together but you have no hope in building successful online business in this new social web if you cannot create real world social networks. You need to drop the business bullshit and maybe next time you get such a large chunk of money you might consider investing in some of the more interesting grass roots entrepreneurship initiatives happening in Belfast that you don't know about (I'm talking about OpenCoffee & The hopefully soon-to-make-it-to-Belfast Coworking).

I'll be following up tomorrow with a couple of more positive points on how we can boost the web and creative industries in Northern Ireland.

Really did not ever think I would see the day we would have one technology related event in Belfast. This week, there are three...

OpenCoffee Club

Tonight the Belfast OpenCoffee Club is meeting at AM:PM on Upper Arthur Street at 6pm. I'll be heading for food at about 5pm if anyone wants to join me for some very affordable and tasty grub. Here's a map if you're lost.

New Ways To Create Revenue Online | The Broadband Content Opportunity

What a mouthful. Organised by a new? body crea8ivity. Looking forward to attending one of the first big tech events in Northern Ireland and seeing what kind of state the industry is in up here, there have been very few opportunities to really gauge it but I'm going to have to go with corporate mire. Sad but true, Dublin is light years ahead of Belfast in terms of people and their attitudes. I'm really hoping I'm guessing wrong and it isn't a den of "snake-oil salesmen" as Eoghan alluded to in his recent (finally!) blog post.

This is on tomorrow night 30th January, 5pm at the Innovation Centre at the Northern Ireland Science Park.

Open Island Conference

A one day conference on open source software, the programme seems quite vague from looking at it but should hopefully be quite interesting. This is on all day Friday at the Spires centre in Belfast.

See you there!

Last week I attended the TechLudd event in Dublin it was the first (hopefully of many) TechLudd events in Ireland. Maybe the name will change again, but I think the spirit at least will live on. It was organised by Anton and Jessica fair play to them for flying in the face of adversity and starting "The largest and most successful social tech related event Ireland has ever seen". Here's to TechLudd Belfast, watch this space...

Oh and there are some pix

• By Paul, and then some
• By Marcus
• By Jessica

I recently put together an iPhone application to get Translink bus and train times on your iPhone. It started out life as a rails application, I was intently set on "Translink on Rails" for the article title but a last minute change to using the merb framework saw to that. Really enjoyed my first real app using merb, it had a certain freeing aspect having such a bare bones framework to start on.

The iPhone interface was dead simple thanks to the iui library, leaving the guts of the work writing a parser for the completely awful HTML on the Translink site, needless to say I had to get a little creative. Also used my previous tip for cleaning up dodgy HTML.

There are a couple of improvements I want to make before it's finished such as;

• Earlier and Later links for the search results
• Implement filtering by time
• Implement filtering by future date
• Implement filtering by travel mode (bus and/or train)
• Nicer interface
• Make it iPhone/iPod touch only and display a message to users on other browsers

If you have any feedback or you find it useful please let me know, go try it out!

Previously known as OpenBeer (Thanks to Marcus and Eoghan for the name. I think it's much better than OpenBeer and doesn't step on the toes of the similarly named OpenBSD group.

Eoghan started this off in Dublin last year as a tongue-in-cheek event aimed at the same crowd as OpenCoffee but with a later time slot and substituting beers for coffees. If you're interested in tech, the web or business and want to meet others that share these interests you should come along. The venue is The Apartment, Belfast (map) at 6pm tomorrow Friday the 18th of January 2008. Leave me a comment if you're coming so I can gauge numbers, I'm buying the first round! I know, I know it's short notice... more organisation coming soon to an OpenBeer event near you.

UPDATE: Event added to upcoming for your convenience UPDATE: Changed the name to #PintsForStarters, oh and there's another event happening down in dublin tonight. If that's handier for you.