Technical Notes

Industry Ignorance

Today I let out a dejected sigh after reading a response to my latest post on the Joel on Software message board.  My post was just a reminder about the BostonScalability User Group meeting that takes place next Wednesday the 28th.  I post the meeting announcements on JoS and a good number of people hear about the meetings from the JoS board.  Every month a few new people tell me they found the group through JoS.  So why did I sigh after reading the response to the meeting reminder?

I don’t make any money running the group.  In fact it costs me money.  I do a good amount of planning, coordinating, buying, booking and raffle prize finding for the group.  I love seeing 30+ people show up for our after work meetings.   It’s a lot of work but I do it because I am passionate about emerging trends in application scalability.  It’s a labor of love that I find professionally and personally rewarding.  Like all good geeks I maintain a healthy hobby writing software outside business hours.

I’m interested in building bigger, better software.  Batch applications, database interactions, web applications, CPU intensive algorithims should be as effective as possible.  Effective does not necessarily mean efficient.  Effectiveness is based on price, time-to-market, performance, maintenance cost, etc.  Analyzing these facets is important. The tools used to arrive at the solution are important, too.

BostonSUG has wonderful speakers who generously donate their time to speak at our meetings.  These people come in from all over the country.  Just a few examples, we’ve hosted Orion Letizi and Nikita Ivanov from San Francisco, Billy Newport from Minnesota and Mike Culver from Washington.  We’ve had numerous local speakers who we appreciate just as much as those that fly to see us.  Patrick Peralta, Tom O’Hare and Rakesh Chaudhary had large audiences.  Each of these speakers is an expert in a different facet of building scalable applications.  They are industry leaders in compute clouds, data grids, object caching, streaming media and more.

One thing we haven’t touched yet is building a web site that performs well.  The person that replied to the meeting reminder said:

save your time:
only put strings in session; and only put one item per-user in the session; unless they are doing some heavy form processing.
use native clustering.
put professional load balancer in from.
max pipe.

Thanks.  That is a helpful reply.  It immediately invalidates the hours of insightful discussion we’ve had at past BostonSUG meetings that have spent less than five minutes total dedicated to the problem to which he so generously offers his solution</sarcasm>.

This is a picture of what is described in the reply post.  As an industry we have known this works for a long time.  That’s why we don’t talk about the architecture depicted by this diagram at BostonSUG.  Sure, we’ll talk about HOW an app server achieve scalability.  We’ll talk about the implementation, not just about using JBoss or Mongrel.  We got a good look inside GridGain.  We had a guided tour around Terracotta.  BostonSUG evokes deeper discussion than “small sessions, load balancer, database cluster, done!”.  You should do that anyway.

Past meetings aside we have a lot to talk about this year.  Rails 3, Java 7, CloudFront, Hibernate Shards, Google AppEngine, tons of topics that push the industry foward.  If you’re interested in evolving and not building the same old software then come to BostonSUG.  If you’re interested in building what we know works (and have known since pre-2000) then it’s not the meeting for you.

I didn’t intend for this to turn into a meeting plug but I might as well include the link to the meeting announcement.  Wednesday January 28, 2009 @ 6 p.m.  IBM Innovation Center Waltham, MA 02451