Building Scalable Websites

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May 22
2006

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Building Scalable Websites

Those of you who liked my Database War Stories series of posts are going to love Cal Henderson's new book, Building Scalable Web Sites. Cal is of course the lead web developer for Flickr, and the guy who put fear into the hearts of IT shops everywhere by his reported practice of putting builds of Flickr out to the net every half hour, demonstrating just how different web development can be from traditional software development. In this book, he gives practical advice on everything from web application architecture, to development environments, to performance optimization and database scaling. Not to mention Web services API design. Oh, and how to do it all on the cheap. Definitely one for my Web 2.0 reading list.

tags: web 2.0 | comments: 8 | Sphere It
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Comments: 8

Anonymous [05.22.06 06:23 AM]

The link to Building Scalable Web Sites is incorrect: the "l" of html is missing.

BillyG [05.22.06 07:03 AM]

So are the War Stories over? I have several links now and would love to consolidate it. A great series, thx.

Tim O'Reilly [05.22.06 08:34 AM]

Thanks, anonymous. Fixed it.

BillyG - Yes, the series is over, unless I happen to re-open it due to some great new stories. For now, there are links to all of the pieces at the bottom of each one.

Ryan Carson [05.22.06 10:53 AM]

Hey Tim, Cal's book is going to rock :) He's one of the most talented developers I've ever met. He just posted a great article called Serving JavaScript Fast which explains how to speed up your web apps. Best, Ryan

Bert Armijo [05.22.06 07:49 PM]

I'm looking forward to reading Cal's book. Often, this seems to be a black art with little real data availible on the subject.

Perrin Harkins [05.23.06 12:23 PM]

Anyone can put out a new build every half hour. The trick is doing it without breaking things. That's usually the function of QA, and hard to replace completely with automated tests. I'll be interested to read what techniques they used at Flickr to keep things from falling apart without allowing time for QA.

Search Engines Web [05.24.06 06:34 PM]

Tom Coates reflects on Cal's workshop he attended a few months ago

Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr.

www.plasticbag.org/archives/2005/06/cal_henderson_on_how_we_built_flickr.shtml

Ori Lahav [01.25.07 01:59 PM]

Tim
I was wondering if we can have the story of wikipedia - in the Database war stories