Link Summly acquired for $30M, but the technology wasn't even theirs?

The major news outlets led me to believe Summly had invented their own NLP technology. Apparently not. So what exactly did Yahoo buy? Ouch.

Link Need developers, designers and creatives to grow your business? Meet CollabFinder.

Fascinating interview with my partner Saha on how he came up with the idea for CollabFinder. I especially love the photo from Jelly, circa 2007. Everyone in that room went on to do great things.

Link I am a Terrible Programmer

Just because you graduated with a degree in computer science from Penn does not make you the next Jason Cohen or Patrick McKenzie.  You have to do more than just finish your homework to become a good coder.

Like most things in life, the answer to what a good coder is, is somewhere in between the guy who wants to get it out fast and the guy who wants to make it beautiful.

The answer is: a good coder knows when something should be quick and dirty, and when something should be thorough and clean. You learn to ask: is this really necessary? And sometimes taking a extra few hours to plan out how you’re going to build something is necessary.

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When Relational Isn’t Enough: Neo4j at Squidoo

A look at how Squidoo used the Neo4j graph database to power our new Postcards product.

Link jordan orelli: Why I went from Python to Go (and not node.js)

jordanorelli:

People often ask me why I have decided that I’d be writing the bulk of my new code in Go, which I started programming in November of 2011 while attending Hacker School. At that time, concurrency was a very hot topic in Hacker School, and we were all trying out different ways of writing…

Now I want to try Go…

Link How Stripe secured the servers that ran their hacker Capture the Flag contest
Link I love that more and more companies are taking advantage of the cloud to minimize RTT for end users
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If you use Gmail

Stop what you’re doing and enable Two-factor authentication right now, so this will never happen to you.

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Really digging this operations kung fu

A 3scale engineer discusses the curious case of a redis server that frequently EOMs, ultimately uncovering a cross-provider network problem. 

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What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

instagram-engineering:

One of the questions we always get asked at meet-ups and conversations with other engineers is, “what’s your stack?” We thought it would be fun to give a sense of all the systems that power Instagram, at a high-level; you can look forward to more in-depth descriptions of some of these systems in the future. 

While the stack is about what I’d expect from Instagram, I found the conversational format of the post to be particularly useful for describing architecture.