From Authority

Y Combinator List: http://yclist.com/

When Adam D'Angelo says "partition your data at the application level", what exactly does he mean
  - FriendFeed did a pretty good writeup on theirs here (though there are some other differences between their system and what I'm advocating, the system for partitioning and maintaining secondary indexes fits right in): http://bret.appspot.com/entry/ho..
 - see also Memcache lessons from Reddit    Reddit lessons
Memcache  Implementation lessons from different companies  - asr: a Ton of companies are using memcache with Schema Less Databse ...
mySQL , Memcache at NetLog http://www.jurriaanpersyn.com/archives/2009/02/12/database-sharding-at-netlog-with-mysql-and-php/

http://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql  -- SchemaLess DB ..,,

Memcached and "N" things you can do with it – Part 1

http://abhinavsingh.com/blog/2009/01/mysql-query-cache-wp-cache-apc-memcache-what-to-choose/

Why Quora Use MYSQL not  MongDB

Why did Quora choose Python for its development?

What languages and frameworks were used to code Quora

 - We use Thrift to communicate between different backend systems.

- Our main webserver is paste (the default for Pylons) with nginx and HAProxy in front of it.  For our Comet server, we use Tornado.
- We mostly use Amazon EC2 and S3 for hosting.
- Our data store is mostly MySQL + memcached right now, plus two services written in C++.

MemCache answers

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 HTTP Servers, Proxies , and Caching ...

Nginx's load balancing features are less advanced than haproxy's but it can do a lot more things (eg: compression, caching), which explains why they are very commonly found together. I strongly recommend it to whoever needs a fast, reliable and flexible web server !
  http://nginx.org/en/  -- features ..

January 2012 Web Server Survey - NginX gained
WordPress moved to NginX 8-9K connections/sec 8-9k requests/second  and about 1.2Gbit/sec through a few Nginx instances and have plenty of room to grow!

Varnish  https://www.varnish-cache.org/about  - Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.


HAProxy is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is particularly suited for web sites crawling under very high loads while needing persistence or Layer7 processing. Supporting tens of thousands of connections is clearly realistic with todays hardware
HAProxy used by Yelp , same thing used by  Quora 

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Trello.com  

1/ Development effort

- 8 member team worked 9 months: We had two developers, two designers / front-end developers, two developer interns, and help from our sys admins, support team, and founders Joel and Michael

- I would say a rough estimate of around 3,300 person-hours went into Trello.

- Trello took nine months to develop from concept to launch. 

2/ What language is Trello written in? Mostly Coffeescript.

3/ Launching Trello : PR , 9 months effort , user visits

posterous Tech Stack

http://technology.posterous.com/posterous-spaces-is-built-on-backbonejs

To interact with the API, we've used some awesome front-end technologies. Among all the awesome stuff we've been able to work with while creating Spaces, the most notable are  Backbone, CoffeeScript, Haml.js, Sass, and Compass. Today I will touch on our use ofBackbone.

How LinkedIn used Node.js and HTML5 to build a better, faster app

 who: LinkedIn’s mobile development lead Kiran Prasad

 -The app is two to 10 times faster on the client side than its predecessor, and on the server side, it’s using a fraction of the resources, thanks to a switch from Ruby on Rails to Node.js

-They went from running 15 servers with 15 instances (virtual servers) on each physical machine, to just four instances that can handle double the traffic. 
- Also, the app is insanely lightweight. “If you take our entire app and you combine all the framework pieces and zip it, it’s under 50K,” said Prasad.

-On the server side, our entire mobile software stack is completely built in Node,” said Prasad. “We use a ton of technologies at LinkedIn, but for the mobile server piece

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Choosing the Best Architecture

Nick Kallen (@nk), twitter engineer:

• "All engineering solutions are transient
• Nothing's perfect but some solutions are good enough for a while
• Scalability solutions aren't magic. They involve partitioning, indexing, and replication
• All data for real-time queries MUST be in memory. Disk is for writes only.
• Some problems can be solved with pre-computation, but a lot can't
• Exploit locality where possible"

Big Data in Real-Time at Twitter: http://www.slideshare.net/nkallen/q-con-3770885
Instagram architecture: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Burbn-Instagram-choose-Postgres-over-MySQL?q=instagram+database
Foursquare: http://www.quora.com/What-stack-does-Foursquare-run-on-EC2?q=foursquare+technology
Facebook: http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/18/the-software-behind-facebook/ and
http://www.quora.com/What-database-technology-is-Facebook-built-on?q=facebook+database
Groupon architecture: http://www.quora.com/Groupon/What-technology-platform-is-Groupon-built-on?q=groupon+technology
Zynga: http://www.quora.com/How-does-server-technology-work-for-Zyngas-games?q=zynga+technology
LinkedIn: http://www.quora.com/What-is-LinkedIn-s-database-architecture-like?q=linkedin+database
Quora: http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined
Yelp: http://www.quora.com/What-is-Yelps-technology-stack?q=yelp+technology

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How I Designed CodeYear.com in 1 Hour

- So despite the late hour, I said I didn’t mind helping, got the PSD, and hopped into Photoshop for a few quick touch ups.

- Using a standard font often means you’re missing an opportunity to make a statement and create a connection with the user. This is why I choseMuseo Slab, a strong yet playful font that I knew was available on Typekit as a webfont.

asr: we need this kind of help for  showing VCs, after developing  a simple UI ... b) it seems they do first in Photoshop and convert to HTML 

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site has Great UI , seems  Photoshop driven .. http://mixpanel.com/

Why You Should Use Analytics

The fundamental reason you want to use analytics is because

-  it lets you know how your customers interact with your site and

-  that this drives decisionmakingabout your site design, future business directions, and the like. 

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/tracking-with-mixpanel.htm#code