Category: Uncategorized

Years and years ago I made a casual (yet accurate) remark to Tim O’Reilly about the relative use of our SOAP and REST web services. At that time REST accounted for something like 85% of our usage. Tim blogged our conversation, which was subsequently picked up by Slashdot. It’s been fun to see this casual […]

Jonathan Boutelle gave a talk about scalable web architectures at a Bar Camp in Bangalore. His talk focused on how he and his team built Slideshare, including their use of Amazon S3 and Ruby on Rails. Jonanthan’s blog post includes a copy of his presentation (stored in Slideshare, naturally enough) and a video of the […]

Over in the “practice what you preach” department, I’ve spent the last month or so uploading over 18,000 of my family pictures to Smugmug. Even though I store the photos on a RAID drive in my house and move regular DVD backups offsite, I am still relieved that someone else is worrying about my photos. […]

Aaron Koblin, developer of The Sheep Market, has published his thesis as a Word document: The Sheep Market: Two Cents Worth. It is fun to read, with some very far-ranging references and some entertaining diversions. It is interesting to read about Aaron’s hesitancy to be just a cog in a machine, then to see him […]

If you are interested in the art of evangelism, there’s an event coming up that you should attend. It’s called GNoTECon (Global Network of Technology Evangelists Conference), and will be held in Santa Clara, CA on December 4th. Microsoft’s Anand Iyer blogged about it recently, so I won’t repeat everything here. In fact, this is […]

If you’ve got 17 minutes to spare, this TalkCrunch interview with Jeff  Bezos is worth a listen. In addition to learning more about our Web-Scale Computing initiative, you can hear Jeff’s famous laugh for yourself. There’s also a summary of the talk on TechCrunch. If that’s not enough, there’s another podcast interview over at Information […]

This photo was taken as our team was leaving the MIT Emerging Technologies Conference last month: So far the best caption we’ve come up with internally is “Excuse me, but can you tell us where the physics building is? And how do we find the Mensa Club?” If you’ve got a better one, leave us […]

Backing up data to Amazon’s Secure Storage S3 has been the hot-favorite-use-case for many companies. Webmail.us, the email hosting company, who is currently serving more than 27,000 businesses and hosting more than 350,000 paid mailboxes and growing by close to 10% per month, is now using amazon S3 for backing up encrypted email data. Smart […]